A placid pool in Montour Run in Moon Township.
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Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church
This is an old congregation, founded in 1837, and its adjoining cemetery has some stones dating from shortly after that. It has grown continuously; the building you see here was designed by Chauncey W. Hodgdon and built in 1915, and encrusted with additions fore and aft in later years. But the congregation (still Methodist, but advertising itself these days just as “Ingomar Church”) outgrew this church and built a much bigger one across the street; this is now the Ingomar Church Community Life Center.
The 1915 church was originally built very cheaply; its final cost of about $9,000 was roughly equivalent to the price of two middle-class houses at the time. A good history of the church was written in 1962 by Margaret L. Sweeney, and we take our information from that booklet (but we have corrected the spelling of the architect’s name).
Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The new building across the street is in a grandiose New Classical style that recalls colonial New England churches and refracts them through a Postmodernist lens.
Ingomar is an unincorporated community that straddles two municipalities. Most of the church grounds and the cemetery are in the borough of Franklin Park, but the border with McCandless Township runs diagonally through this building.
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Hillside House in Carrick
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Dutch Colonial meets Normandy in an attractively eclectic house that you can see from a long way away, because it perches on the side of a steep hill.
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Victorian Gothic in Lawrenceville
Hidden behind bushes and later additions is an exceptional example of Victorian Gothic domestic architecture. It seems to have been built in the 1870s to face Sherman Street, a street that vanished by 1890, or possibly existed only on paper; today the original front faces a nameless private alley behind the midcentury-modern Arsenal Place townhouses. The corner has been filled in with a later addition, and then another even later frame-and-stucco addition has been added; but the gables and dormers survive with their Gothic-arch windows and original ornamental woodwork.
For many years, this house is marked on plat maps as belonging to the Rev. J. G Brown, D. D., who already owned the property (possibly with a smaller house on it) in 1872.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
Potomac Station, Dormont
Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film. Potomac gives Red Line riders easy access to the Dormont business district, which is full of odd little shops and restaurants that make it well worth a visit. Some of the houses in streets nearby are architecturally significant, and a walk through the back streets of Dormont is always pleasant.
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Old Service Station in Arlington
Very few service stations from the early years of the automobile have survived in Pittsburgh, even though Pittsburgh invented the drive-up filling station. This one is a good representative of the class, and though it no longer sells gasoline it remains in the automobile business today.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Stained Glass in the Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum
“America the Beautiful,” by Katherine Lee Bates. The Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum is now advertised as the Temple of Memories, because our taste has gone in that direction. It’s a very large communal mausoleum, built in 1960, and walking through the doors feels like going through a time portal into the end of the Eisenhower era. By far the most striking feature of the mausoleum is the series of stained-glass windows by Willet in Philadelphia and Hunt in Pittsburgh. They are some of the best modern stained glass in Pittsburgh, and they commemorate great triumphs of religious literature and music. We have a lot of large pictures here, so we’ll put them behind a “read more” link to avoid weighing down the front page.
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