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Neville House, Oakland
Tasso Katselas designed this apartment building, which opened in 1959. James D. Van Trump described it a few years later: “Glass, brick and concrete cage raised into space on arched stilts in the manner of Le Corbusier and at the time it was built the most ‘advanced’ apartment house in Pittsburgh.”
The drama of the building is in those arched stilts. They make approaching the building from the street an event. In typical Katselas fashion, they also solve a practical problem: they make room for a useful porte cochere while allowing the rest of the building to take up as much of its lot as possible.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Print of a Sweetgum Leaf
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. The leaf has blown away, but the impression it left on the sidewalk will remain for a while longer.
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Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown
Still Pittsburgh’s largest hotel, this opened in 1959 as the Pittsburgh Hilton. It was designed by William Tabler, the Hilton company’s pet architect. Originally it was, as James D. Van Trump told us in The Stones of Pittsburgh, “partially sheathed in panels of gold anodized aluminum, very appropriate to a luxury hotel.” The panels have been painted over.
The addition to the front opened in 2014; it does not seem to go with the rest of the building.
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Two Houses on Centennial Avenue, Sewickley
Two houses on one of Sewickley’s toniest streets. First, a house with the simple dignity of the Greek Revival.
This house has the form of what old Pa Pitt calls a center-hall foursquare, with details taken from colonial New England.
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Valley Presbyterian Church, Imperial
This charming Arts-and-Crafts Gothic church is the most distinguished building in the little hamlet of Imperial. It was built, according to the date stone, in 1911 for a congregation that had been founded in 1840, and the large cemetery behind the church has tombstones going back to that foundation.
The outstanding feature of the church is its belfry, with simple and massive woodwork that echoes the Gothic arches below, but also flares out into bell shapes, like a Sunday-school-supplement illustration of the bells within.
Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285. A postwar Sunday-school wing in the rear is built from nearly matching brick.
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Shakespeare’s Honeysuckle
Lonicera periclymenum is the honeysuckle Shakespeare knew and celebrated. A number of cultivars with flowers in different color combinations have been bred; this one is called “Peaches and Cream.” Unlike Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), it does not take over whole counties, so it is a responsible garden flower in our area.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera. -
Some Houses on Maple Lane, Sewickley
Three houses on one of the many pleasant residential streets in Sewickley. First, a late-Victorian fantasy of Georgian architecture.
This house has probably had some alterations over the years, but it preserves a unique dormer on the side.
Finally, an extravagant riot of gables and dormers.
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Fungus on a Log
Kodak EasyShare Z981. A very decorative fungus growing on a log deep in the woods in Bird Park, Mount Lebanon.
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House from the 1880s in McKees Rocks
Kodak EasyShare Z1285. In the 1880s, the old Lorenz Hufnagle property was sold off in lots and built over with little frame houses like this.
1890 Hopkins plat map with this house circled. Frame houses are yellow on these maps; brick houses are red. Later, when Island Avenue became a commercial district, the little frame houses were replaced by storefronts and apartment buildings—except this one, which survived almost unaltered. At some point it was sheathed in diamond asbestos-cement shingles, which are nearly perfectly preserved. It would probably cost a fortune to remove them because of the asbestos, but in this stable state they pose no danger.
