A southbound Siemens trolley and a northbound CAF trolley cross Castle Shannon Boulevard in the middle of Castle Shannon.
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Alexander M. Guthrie House, Shadyside
This exceptionally fine country house on Ellsworth Avenue has been absorbed by the city, but maintains its rural dignity. It was built just after the Civil War in about 1870, and all the best features of the era are represented—generous porch, huge tall windows, and a dignified but not monotonous simplicity of form.
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King Edward Apartments, Oakland
This is a huge composite picture, so don’t click on it unless you have the megabytes to spare. This elegant apartment building on Craig Street had a typically Pittsburgh problem to solve. The lot is irregularly shaped and (of course) not level. The architect’s answer was a façade that is varied enough to mask the fact that it does not quite line up with the street. At first glance, the front seems symmetrical; the second and third glances will reveal the curious staggering of the wall.
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Craftsman-Modernist Apartment Building, Mount Lebanon
Well, this one didn’t quite work.
Old Pa Pitt has mentioned how he enjoys seeing the experiments builders try with small apartment buildings. Here we see a builder who seems to have absorbed some of the ideas of modernism and added some Craftsman-style details: the three-over-one windows, the decorative brickwork, the wood-framed entrance. But the details seem applied at random, and a modernist architect would have been more regular in the geometry. Note the lack of rhythm or alignment in the windows, which throws off the whole façade. The second and third floors have windows in groups of 2, 1, 3, 2; the first floor has groups of 2, 1, 2, 1, and they do not line up at all with the windows above them. The entrance does not line up vertically or horizontally with anything else in the building; its awkward corner placement seems to leave some of the trim hanging off the edge.
Someone will probably come along and tell Father Pitt that this building is by a famous modernist architect, and old Pa Pitt will only say that the architect was having a bad day.
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J & K Building, Allegheny West
This little building sits next to the old Western Theological Seminary. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to discover its history with the limited research he was willing to put into the question, so he would be delighted to be enlightened in the comments. It looks as though it might have been an addition to the seminary, done in a sort of late Gothic with Art Deco overtones.
One response
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Georgian Meets Spanish Mission
You have probably never heard anyone say this before, but Father Pitt is fascinated by small apartment buildings. Larger apartment blocks are often designed by famous architects, and they may be masterpieces of their kind. But small apartment buildings sometimes preserve the adventurous whimsies of a builder who was not technically an architect but could draw a blueprint all by himself.
Here is a good example. The third floor of this little apartment building in Mount Lebanon is typical of the Spanish Mission style that was very popular in the near South Hills in the first half of the twentieth century. But below that the details are Georgian. It would be hard to imagine a stranger clash than those two styles—and yet they work well together. Pedestrians walking by never say, “Now there is an outrageously mixed metaphor of a building.” A big-deal architect would probably never do it, but it works.
Addendum: The architect was probably Charles Geisler, who filled Mount Lebanon and Dormont with small apartment buildings.
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Southminster Presbyterian Church, Mount Lebanon
This tasteful Gothic church, finished in 1928, anchors the south end of the Uptown Mount Lebanon business district. The architect was Thomas Pringle, who also gave us the Salvation Army Building downtown.
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The Berkshire, Mount Lebanon
A typical courtyard apartment building in a corner of Mount Lebanon that is full of small to medium-sized apartment buildings. This one is in a simple but attractive Jacobean style, where a few effective details carry all the thematic weight.
