Father Pitt

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Scheibler Apartment Building in Highland Park Condemned
After years of neglect and decay, this apartment building in the otherwise prosperous neighborhood of Highland Park is finally condemned.

And it will be a tragedy to lose it, because it is an extraordinary work by an extraordinary architect.

Frederick Scheibler is possibly the most-talked-about architect Pittsburgh ever produced, and this building—put up in 1906 for Mary M. Coleman—marks a turning point in Scheibler’s style, according to his biographer Martin Aurand. “The facade departs from precedent, however, in the sheer strength of its massing, and in its near total lack of common domestic imagery—even a cornice.… There is virtually no exterior ornament at all. The Coleman facade continues a process of abstraction begun at the Linwood [in North Point Breeze], but the leap forward in Scheibler’s developing style is sudden.”¹

Considering the value of real estate in Highland Park right now, restoring this building should be not only public-spirited but also profitable. Is any ambitious developer willing to take it on? That blue sticker isn’t necessarily a death sentence: it will be removed if the dangerous conditions are remediated. To make it easier for you, Scheibler’s original drawings for this building are preserved in the Architecture Archive at Carnegie Mellon, so there need be no guesswork in the restoration.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
1. Martin Aurand, The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr., p. 42 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). ↩︎
December 13, 2024
Christmas at the Mount Oliver Municipal Building

Almost by accident the Mount Oliver Municipal Building is a very attractive little building. It probably dates from the middle 1920s, and it was designed with minimal decoration but a tasteful attention to detail—note the brick pilasters that frame the façade and the little brickwork ornaments above the inscription, two small touches that preserve the building from banality. The front has been modernized, but the newer doors and windows fit into the building well and accent the form of it; too often we see renovations that ignore the rest of the building. We should also not neglect to point out that the two inscriptions are just about perfect, simple but in exactly the right spots, and with the letters spaced just right.

The borough of Mount Oliver puts up very tasteful greenery along Brownsville Road for the Christmas season, and a fine Christmas tree next to the municipal building.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 13, 2024
Lowries Run, Emsworth

Colors of the December forest along Lowries Run as it cuts its way through rocks to get to the Ohio River.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 12, 2024
A Little Bank in the McKees Rocks Bottoms

This little building, unless Father Pitt’s correspondents and his own conclusions are mistaken, was the Bottoms branch of the First National Bank of McKees Rocks, and it was a late work of the firm of Alden, Harlow & Jones. Whether the identification is correct or not, however, it is a fine piece of work, and another demonstration of the remarkable architectural riches of the McKees Rocks Bottoms.

The beehive, symbolic of industry and thrift, would be a good emblem for a bank. It is a bit odd for the business that has occupied the building for decades now, which is an undertaker’s establishment.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 12, 2024
Snow

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 11, 2024
John Frew House, Westwood

There are very few houses from the 1700s left in the city of Pittsburgh (though there are quite a few more in the suburbs and countryside nearby), and this one just barely qualifies. Move it a hundred yards and it would be in Crafton, but it is on the Pittsburgh side of that line.

As far as anyone knows, the John Frew house is the only house from the 1700s in the city still in use as a house. The stone section on the right was built in about 1790; the bigger Greek Revival addition was built in about 1840.

Also built in 1790 was the spring house next to the house. In the 1950s, a garage was added to the spring house, and it was done with nearly perfect taste. The garage was designed on the model of the 1840 part of the house, so that the spring house and garage form a sort of reduced mirror image of the main house. Father Pitt does not know who supervised the addition, but our famous architect and preservationist Charles Stotz would have been capable of it.

Sony Alpha 3000.

December 11, 2024
Pair of Double Houses in Beechview

Pittsburgh is full of tiny houses like these, and there’s not much special about these four in particular, except that they demonstrate how even the humblest dwellings have stories to tell after a century of history. These little doubles were originally identical, but they have had separate adventures. Two of the houses have had one of their upstairs windows bricked in; one of them has had the window replaced with a three-staggered-light front door, which is an amusing trick to play on houseguests. The pair on the left have had their flat porch roofs replaced with peaked roofs. All of them probably had green tile (or possibly red) on the overhangs above the upstairs windows. The main purpose of those overhangs is to serve as a signifier of the Spanish Mission style, which was very popular when these houses were built. The overhangs may also serve as a talisman to ward off the aluminum-awning salesman, and it worked in three out of four of the houses.

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

December 11, 2024
Martha-Marion Apartments, Mount Lebanon

This fairy-tale palace on Ralston Place preserves most of its charming original details. You will notice right away the most outrageously tall and pointy front gable in the tri-state area (cleverly echoed to give more of an illusion of depth), but after that pause to appreciate the original windows, seldom preserved in apartment buildings of this age, and carefully chosen to balance the other details of the building.

We have some reason to suspect that the plans came from the office of architect Charles Geisler, prolific producer of small and medium-sized apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, as well as Squirrel Hill and elsewhere. If old Pa Pitt finds more specific documentation, he will confirm or revise this attribution.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 10, 2024
Crafton High School

Still in use, with modern additions, as Crafton Elementary School, this Jacobean palace was built in 1913. The architect was Press C. Dowler, already well into a career that would last another half-century. His assignment here seems to have been to make up in spectacle for what the little borough’s high school lacked in size, and he came through with the goods, festooning the building with crenellations and terra-cotta ornamentation. But although the decoration may be a bit extravagant, it is done with good taste, making a balanced composition outlined by the sharp contrast between the red brick and the white trim.

The original school had two identical entrances—probably, as was common in those days, one for boys and one for girls.

Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 10, 2024
Three Buildings on Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Three different buildings, three different styles: polyphony makes harmony in the streetscape.

December 10, 2024