Father Pitt

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Second Empire Row on North Avenue in Manchester

The Second Empire style is a good fit for high-class rowhouses, because it was created specifically to stuff the most usable volume into the least taxable building. Supposedly it came about because houses in France of Napoleon III’s time were taxed by the area of the rooms, but attics were not counted in the calculation. All the space above the roofline was dismissed as attic by the law; therefore, if the roof could bulge out to make an attic the same size as the other floors, you got an extra floor tax-free. Americans adopted the style because they liked the way it looked and the way it solved the practical problems of space.

This row of seven houses drops a few feet after the first three. Manchester is a flat neighborhood, but only by Pittsburgh standards. Old maps show that the row was built between 1872 and 1882.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100;

A very clever detective might deduce that these pictures were taken on two different visits.

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January 17, 2025
Your Carson Street Snow Globe

Carson Street on the South Side is reputed to be one of the best-preserved Victorian commercial streets in North America. Mere snow cannot deter old Pa Pitt from his duty of documenting the city around him, so here is a generous album of Carson Street buildings, most of Victorian vintage, with falling snow for added picturesque effect.

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January 16, 2025
Goettler Building, South Side

Carson Street on the South Side is known as one of the best-preserved Victorian streetscapes in North America. Father Pitt loves to photograph those Victorian buildings, with their lavish yet careful attention to detail; but in a spirit of contrarian perversity, old Pa Pitt also likes to point out the post-Victorian additions to the streetscape. This building was probably put up shortly before 1910 in a very modern style for its time. The front is unusually well preserved, with big display windows wrapping around properly inset entrances.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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January 16, 2025
Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Another look at the Fifth Avenue façade of this very respectable bank building, designed by Press C. Dowler and opened in 1921.

More pictures of the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company building.

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January 16, 2025
Frame Rowhouses on North Avenue, Manchester

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

Manchester is known for its splendid brick Victorian houses, but there are blocks of more modest houses as well—often older than the big brick ones. Here is a row of neat little frame houses, some of which appear—from both old maps and the style of the houses—to date back to the Civil War era.

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January 15, 2025
Some Commercial Buildings on Fifth Avenue, Coraopolis

A few of the commercial buildings on Fifth Avenue, the mainest of the main streets in Coraopolis. We begin with a curious building that reveals its secret as we move along the street: it is a Second Empire building from the late 1800s with a later commercial front added.

An interesting roofline and a bit of Art Nouveau terra-cotta decoration enliven this little storefront.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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January 14, 2025
Queen Anne Meets Second Empire in Manchester

Queen Anne is an expansive style, with turrets and bays and oriels and all kinds of picturesque projections this way and that. When Queen Anne is compressed to the dimensions of a rowhouse, it takes on some of the vocabulary of the Second Empire style, in particular the full third floor under a mansard roof, but adds the irregularity we expect from Queen Anne, with its asymmetry and, of course, its turrets. These two houses on North Avenue are splendidly preserved examples of the collision of the two styles.

Canon PowerShot SX150IS; Nikon COOPLPIX P100; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

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January 13, 2025
Pittsburgh Brass M’f’g Co., Strip

Now known as the Brass Building, this is a well-preserved example of high-class industrial architecture from the turn of the twentieth century.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

By good luck, space was available when the building was converted for an addition to house elevators and stairwells.

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January 13, 2025
Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 1891 and Today

In 1891 the Architectural Record ran a long illustrated feature on “The Romanesque Revival in America.” Naturally it dwelt on the accomplishments of H. H. Richardson, and in particular on Trinity Church in Boston and the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, his two most famous buildings. But what about the work done in the “Richardsonian Romanesque” style since Richardson’s death? Few churches could stand up to Trinity, but…

A Presbyterian church at Pittsburg by Mr. Richardson’s successors, Messrs. Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, is an unmistakable and a very successful piece of Richardsonian Romanesque, which owes much of its success to the skill with which the central tower, a lower and much simpler crowning feature than that of [Trinity Church in] Boston, is developed into the church to which the other features of a short nave and shallow transepts are brought into harmonious subordination.

The church has not changed much since the picture above was published in 1891. It has expanded, but the expansions have been carefully matched to the original. And since the soot has been cleaned off, it looks almost as just-built today as it did when it was new—and almost as timelessly ancient, which is the paradoxical trick that the best Richardsonian Romanesque buildings can pull.

There are some secondary sources that say this was one of the projects Richardson had sketched before his death and left his successors to finish, but the earlier sources seem to attribute it entirely to Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.

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January 12, 2025
More Fairy Tales in Cedarhurst Manor, Mount Lebanon

A week or so ago we saw a fairy-tale palace by Paul Scheuneman in Cedarhurst Manor. That house is perhaps the grandest in the plan, but some others are not far behind. Several other fine houses went up in the 1930s; they must have been even more like fairy-tale palaces in their first years, since much of Cedarhurst Manor was sparsely settled until after the Second World War, and these houses would have loomed suddenly out of the woods. They are in different styles, but they all share that prioritizing of the picturesque that is the hallmark of what Father Pitt calls the fairy-tale style of the 1920s and 1930s. Above and below, what Pittsburghers call a Normandy, with a turret cozily tucked into its corner.

This house is of more modest dimensions, and it is similar to many other houses that went up in the suburbs during the Depression. (Many of them were designed by Joseph Hoover, a prolific producer of fairy-tale cottages who went full-on Moderne when he turned to commercial projects: he was the architect of the first Pittsburgh International Airport.) Here we see how the fairy-tale style has filtered down to the middle of the middle class: you may be limited in your resources, but you can still have the little cottage of your childhood dreams. Father Pitt suspects the half-timbered gable has been simplified from an original that would have had more timber.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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January 11, 2025