These splendid marquees with their Art Nouveau lettering in glass welcome us to the Princess Ann, an apartment building in the Colonial Heights plan in Mount Lebanon. Many of the external details of the building are beautifully preserved and maintained, including the art glass on the marquees and in the stairwells.
This is the kind of view that makes Pittsburgh unique among American cities. The pictures were taken from the intersection of Cederhurst Street and Estella Avenue in Beltzhoover.
The White Whale bookstore in Bloomfield. This is Father Pitt’s attempt at applying the principles of De Stijl to photography.
Here is another urban development that sat isolated in the hinterlands for some time after it was built.
Streets had been laid out and land had been divided into lots all over Mount Lebanon, but these duplex houses on the old Schaffer estate were the first buildings to go up for blocks around. Old farmhouses were still standing nearby. At that time the street was called Schaffer Place, but it and Marion Avenue to the south were later renamed Meadowcroft Avenue as an extension of Meadowcroft Avenue across Beverly Road.
The architect who designed these buildings was not content to stamp out the same box ten times and call it a day. The designs are varied within a common theme, making an interesting streetscape that forms a community while giving residents a sense that their own homes are distinct.
Now Zion Christian Church. The cornerstone tells us that the congregation was founded in 1908, and its first building was at the corner of Birmingham Avenue and Hays Avenue (now Amanda Street)—a small frame chapel that must have quickly become woefully overcrowded, since this building many times the size was constructed less than twenty years later.
“The membership is 381, as compared with a membership of 30 in 1908,” says the Gazette Times of February 18, 1925, when the plans for the new building were announced.
The architect was Walter H. Gould, “a member of the church,” and so far this is the only building attributed to him that Father Pitt knows about. However, it is an accomplished if not breathtakingly original design, so there must be other Gould buildings lurking about, probably in the South Hills neighborhoods. Comparing the published rendering above with the church as it stands today shows us that the tower grew about a floor’s worth of height between conception and construction—a rare example, perhaps, of an architect being told that his original design was not ambitious enough.
“By spirit and faith and the help of God.”
The Hotel Henry was on Fifth Avenue; it was replaced in 1951 by the Mellon Bank Building (525 Fifth Avenue). Here we see a huge banquet for the newspapermen of Pittsburgh in 1904, which incidentally gives us a look at the posh appointments of the banquet hall.
North Hills Estates is a suburban plan in Ross Township just north of West View. It was laid out in 1929, and most of the central part was built up in the 1930s—a period when, surprisingly enough, there was quite a bit of house construction going on in the suburbs. For those who had money, it was considered more economical during the Depression to build a new house, what with the low cost of labor and materials, than to buy an existing one. Thousands of houses sat empty, repossessed by lenders, but meanwhile new suburbs like North Hills Estates filled up with beautiful homes.
This is another article for people who like to scroll through dozens of house designs and marvel at the variety of styles, and at the high quality of almost all the designs.
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These two long rows of houses where Beeler Street meets Wilkins Avenue make a striking impression now, but they must have been more striking when they were built in the early 1900s. For several years they sat out in the farmlands of Squirrel Hill, forming a strange urban island (along with two rows of three houses across Beeler Street) in the midst of the otherwise rural East End. We caught them on a dim and rainy evening.
Note how the rhythm of the houses is made more interestingly varied by alternating the peaked and rounded fronts but running the oriels in a series of three.
Acorn Hill is a little enclave in the larger neighborhood known to residents as Observatory Hill, and on city planning maps as Perry North. It has some unusually fine houses in a wide variety of styles, built up over a period of about half a century.
In any neighborhood this one would be an extraordinary house. It would not be out of place in the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony. The porch has been glassed in and the windows in the dormers have been replaced, but the house retains most of its architectural integrity. Father Pitt does not know the architect yet, but among the local architects known to have been influenced by those German and Austrian art magazines that found their way to Pittsburgh we may mention Frederick Scheibler, Kiehnel & Elliott, and Edward Weber.
There’s nothing particularly special about this house, except that it’s a good example of how an architect can vary the incidentals of the usual Pittsburgh Foursquare to produce a pleasing design. The dormer has been altered a bit, but its distinctive central arch remains, though it has been filled with a rectangular stock window.
