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Congregation Ahavath Achim, Carnegie

Ahavath Achim (“Brotherly Love”) is an independent Jewish congregation that describes itself as “traditional, but egalitarian,” meaning that women and men participate equally in traditional Hebrew services. The synagogue was founded in 1903, and the modest and tidy little building blends two styles so successfully that drivers on busy Chestnut Street probably don’t notice the blending. When you stop and look, though, you can see that the foyer is a modernist addition on an early-twentieth-century synagogue (built in 1937, according to a correspondent). The bricks are matched, however, and the sharply drawn lines of the addition seem to fit well with the early-modern rectangularity of the main building.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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August 23, 2025
A Few Houses in Oakdale

Oakdale was a prosperous little town, as we can see by these houses in a variety of styles, all on the same street. It is still a fairly prosperous town today, and most of these houses have been kept up and altered in various ways that suited their inhabitants over the years. We present them without further comment, except to say that, if you come away with the impression that the back streets of Oakdale are very pleasant, your impression is correct.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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August 22, 2025
Minnetonka Building, Shadyside

Built in 1908, the Minnetonka Building was designed by Frederick Scheibler, and it would be hard to imagine the impression it would have made in Edwardian Shadyside. It looks like a building thirty or forty years ahead of its time, with its simple forms and streamlined curves that look forward to the Moderne architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. But it also has details that remind us of the most up-to-the-minute ideas from those Viennese and German art magazines that we know Scheibler got his hands on.

This doorway with its Art Nouveau window and Egyptian-style tapering would have been right at home in a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.

Olympus E-20N.

More pictures of the Minnetonka Building.

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August 21, 2025
Engine House No. 16, North Point Breeze

No longer a firehouse, but the building has been adapted to other uses with care to preserve as much of its original stocky Romanesque look as possible.

Sony Alpha 3000.

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August 20, 2025
Two Old Houses in Noblestown

This old house was probably built in the middle 1800s, but the simple vernacular style of it makes it hard to date with any precision. It was obviously put up at a time when the main street of Noblestown was more a path than a road; now anyone stepping out the front door has to be careful of traffic. (The church in the background is the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church.)

Olympus E-20N.

This somewhat larger house is almost identical in layout; it probably just has larger rooms in the main part of the house. The porch is a later addition—probably from the first quarter of the twentieth century, to judge by the Craftsman-style tapered pillars and rusticated concrete blocks.

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August 19, 2025
Nora McMullen Mellon House, Shadyside

Something interesting must lurk behind this wall along Howe Street.

As we step closer we notice the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque, and we begin to get a view of the cottage beyond the wall.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The sheltering wall seems to be there less to conceal the house than to delight us with the revelation. This is the Nora McMullen Mellon house, built in 1911 from a design by Thomas Scott. The unusual (for Pittsburgh) choice of stucco with brick trim makes this English cottage stand out on the street, and the current owners keep it as pretty as an architect’s rendering.

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August 18, 2025
Pittsburgh New Church, Point Breeze

This picturesque church, built for the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1930, still serves its original congregation, now under the name “The New Church.” The architect was Harold Thorpe Carswell, who had been an apprentice of Ralph Adams Cram; to judge by the few references to him on line, this is one of his best-known works. Few Pittsburghers ever see it, however, because it sits at the end of a one-block dead-end residential street in Point Breeze.

The inscription, in florid medievalistic lettering, reads, “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—an abridged quotation from Swedenborg, which we may translate as “Now we are permitted to enter into the hidden things of the faith.”

The attached school is in a complementary Tudor style.

Olympus E-20N.

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August 17, 2025
Beaux-Arts at the Waterworks

This small but grand pumping station, or some sort of utility building, sits by the reservoirs behind the Waterworks shopping center. Thomas Scott was the architect of most buildings for the Pittsburgh water system in the era when this one was built, and this is certainly in his style, so we attribute it to him with some confidence. The windows that would have flooded the building with light have been blocked in, possibly for security reasons, but more likely because no one could see the point of maintaining glass windows when plywood covers the holes just as well.

On city planning maps, the waterworks, the Waterworks shopping center, and St. Margaret’s Hospital are in the Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhood, which is otherwise on the other side of the Allegheny—one of those neighborhood-boundary absurdities that no real Pittsburgher would recognize. Pittsburghers would say they are at Aspinwall, although they belong to the city and not the borough of Aspinwall.

Behind the encroaching jungle of vines and utility cables we can just make out a pair of classical dolphins—always the emblem of a water-related building—and a cartouche with the city arms.

Olympus E-20N.

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August 16, 2025
Moderne Apartment Building in Shadyside

Composite of two photographs from a Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Probably built in about 1940, this was the science-fiction apartment building of the future. Except for newer windows, it has not changed much.

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August 16, 2025
Oakdale

Oakdale is a pleasant little borough in the western suburbs. The town was devastated by floods from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and some of it never recovered; but the back streets are full of pleasant houses, and the business district has business in it, and the population is growing.

The tiny urban core of Oakdale is a row of shops on Noblestown Road.

This building, 120 years old this year, has kept its corner entrance. Addendum: This was the First National Bank of Oakdale; the architect was Max Brenning.¹

The odd polygonal end of this building probably had large showroom windows at one time.

Finally, an old service station. Few old-fashioned service stations have survived without massive alterations, but this one still keeps its attractive little red-roofed hut with—once again—a corner entrance.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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August 15, 2025