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Altholl, Highland Park
“Altholl” was built on Stanton Avenue for U. S. Steel executive James Scott in 1900. Stanton Avenue, which today is marked as the border between Highland Park and East Liberty on city planning maps, was already lined with grand Queen Anne mansions; but the Colonial Revival was coming into fashion, and Scott’s house must have looked bracingly modern. It has the adaptable form of the typical large Pittsburgh center-hall house of the turn of the twentieth century, which can swing from Georgian to Renaissance to Prairie Style depending on the details. We’ll call this one “eclectic Georgian.” The house is listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
C. H. Fingeret Building, Coraopolis
Father Pitt knows nothing about this building besides what you see here. It was probably a striking Moderne design when it went up in 1943; paint has obscured the patterned brickwork and different materials.
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Three PNC Plaza
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The Market Street end of Three PNC Plaza, which opened in 2009. It is tied with Three Gateway Center as our twentieth-tallest building, and it was the tallest thing built in Pittsburgh in the long skyscraper drought between the 1980s boom and the current crop of skyscrapers. The architects were Gensler and Lou Astorino.
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Meado’cots, Homewood
Designed by our remarkable early modernist Frederick Scheibler, “Meado’cots” is an unusual set of terrace houses built in 1914—another Scheibler answer to the question of how to make cheap rows of houses architecturally attractive. It sat abandoned and boarded up for quite a while, but now it is inhabited and stable. The metal roofs on the central section and the cheap standard doors are not to old Pa Pitt’s taste, but they were within the budget of the new owner, and they keep the buildings standing and in good shape, with the potential for restoration with original materials later.
This composite of the central section from above parked-car level is made possible by a kind neighbor from across the street. He saw us struggling to hold the camera up at arm’s length and called down from a third-floor window to offer the use of his stairs for a better angle. Thank you, Homewood neighbor, for confirming Father Pitt’s impression that Homewood is a place where the neighborly virtues are strong.
Note the corner windows. They would become a badge of modernism in the 1940s, but here they are in 1912!
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Abandoned House in Homewood
Homewood is prospering now more than it has done in decades, but there are still many forgotten corners. This house, in the part of Homewood traditionally called Brushton, has been abandoned and forgotten for a very long time, though the other houses on the street are inhabited and well kept. Because it has been left alone for decades, it preserves details of crumbling shingle and woodwork that have been replaced on all its neighbors. It appears to have been built in the 1890s for J. M. Gruber, and it is a good example of how the Queen Anne style filtered down to the middle classes.
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St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, Strip
Frederick Sauer designed St. Stanislaus Kostka, which was built in 1891. The church presides dramatically over the broad plaza of Smallman Street. It used to look out on a sea of railroad tracks, but its view improved considerably when the Pennsylvania Railroad built its colossal Produce Terminal.
Nikon COOLPIX P100. It is probable that the rectory, done in a matching style, was also designed by Sauer. The glass blocks are not an improvement, but they have kept the building standing and in use.
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The Forest at Gateway Center
The modernist ideal of towers in a park often runs up against the unwillingness of developers to put any resources into the park part. Gateway Center is a notable exception. The park has always been beautifully maintained, and it was planted with an eye on the long term, so that the saplings planted decades ago have grown into a forest of mature trees in the middle of the forest of towers.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
Margaret Buckey, Pittsburgh Radio Star
“Margaret Buckey, well-known soprano, who is familiar to the fans who tune in on Station KQV, Pittsburgh, is shown above.” A large portrait from the front page of Radio Digest, November 1, 1924.
In the 1920s, when radio was young, the relatively few stations could be heard for long distances, depending on atmospheric conditions and, of course, the size of your aerial. The days before radio networks were a brief glorious age of distributed talent, when the chief entertainers of any city might be heard nationwide and develop a following. Radio networks changed all that: by distributing the same programs nationwide, they concentrated all the radio celebrities in New York, where their studios were.
Father Pitt does not know much about Margaret Buckey, except that she seems to have been a familiar voice on KQV in its very early days. Here is a program scheduled on KQV for December 27, 1922:
10:00 P. M. Program will be given by Miss Margaret Buckey, soprano and Ken Hudson, ukulele and steel guitarist, both of Pittsburgh, who will present a holiday program of the most popular sort. Miss Buckey excels in the songs being heard on Broadway and will sing several new ones and Mr. Hudson will play guitar accompaniment to some of them. The Hawaiian songs, native to his own country to also be a part of the program. Interspersed a number of new dance novelties will be broadcast. A program with a flavor of the holiday season. Ralph Skiles, guitarist will furnish some of the ensemble for both instrumental and vocal numbers. Program: Soprano Songs: “Three o’clock in the Morning,” with duet guitar accompaniment: “A Kiss in the Dark,” by Herbert; “A Little Street in Gay Paree,” from “The Spice of 1922;” “A Corner up in Heaven,” by Berlin, “Home, Sweet, Home,” with string accompaniment. Instrumental numbers: “Kalima” Waltz, for two guitars; “Hawaiian Hula Medley,” two guitars; Hawaiian Song, with ukulele. (selected); “Kanaha Kiki,” ukulele solo. —Radio Broadcasting News, December 23, 1922 (PDF).
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Alpha Terrace, East Liberty
Alpha Terrace, a set of unusually fine Victorian rowhouses designed by James T. Steen1 in an eclectic Romanesque with bits of Second Empire and Gothic thrown in, is a historic district of its own. The houses are on both sides of Beatty Street in East Liberty. The row on the northwest side of the street went up in about 1885.
The houses on the southeast side of the street are a few years newer, probably from about 1894, and they incorporate more of the Queen Anne style, with shingles and ornate woodwork.
The rest of our pictures are from the sunny side of the street, for very practical photographic reasons. We’ll return when the light is better for the houses on the southeast side.
Separate ownership is not always kind to terraces like this, but the aluminum siding on the roof is about the worst alteration Alpha Terrace has suffered.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. - Old Pa Pitt is nearly certain of this attribution. The Wikipedia article, possibly following the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, attributes the design to Murphy & Hamilton, but Father Pitt is fairly sure that Murphy & Hamilton were contractors, not architects; they probably built the terraces. Alpha Terrace is attributed to Steen in a Historic Resource Survey Form for another of his buildings that was demolished anyway (PDF). The style of Alpha Terrace is very similar to the style of Steen’s downtown YMCA (demolished long ago), which, though it was on a much grander scale, used the same prickly witch’s caps and squarish dormers; it was pictured in the American Architect and Building News for February 10, 1883.
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- Old Pa Pitt is nearly certain of this attribution. The Wikipedia article, possibly following the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, attributes the design to Murphy & Hamilton, but Father Pitt is fairly sure that Murphy & Hamilton were contractors, not architects; they probably built the terraces. Alpha Terrace is attributed to Steen in a Historic Resource Survey Form for another of his buildings that was demolished anyway (PDF). The style of Alpha Terrace is very similar to the style of Steen’s downtown YMCA (demolished long ago), which, though it was on a much grander scale, used the same prickly witch’s caps and squarish dormers; it was pictured in the American Architect and Building News for February 10, 1883.
