Garden Way looking eastward from Fisk Street.
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Cratsley Building, Imperial
A fairly large building for the little town of Imperial. The depth of the building and the blankness of the ground floor make old Pa Pitt wonder whether it was used as a theater.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Penn Main
“Penn Main” is the name Pittsburghers give to the district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street, which (this being Pittsburgh) is not the main street of anything. On city planning maps, Penn Avenue is the border between Lawrenceville and Bloomfield; and since the sun was shining on the Lawrenceville side when we visited, all these buildings are counted as being in Lawrenceville for planning purposes. We begin above with a nicely preserved example of a typical small Victorian store with apartment above.
Penn Avenue and Main Street do not meet at a right angle, so the buildings on the corner are forced into odd shapes. The one above deals with its acute angle by blunting the point of it. The one below (seen in a picture from two years ago) has a less offensive obtuse angle to deal with.
The Second Empire style in its Pittsburgh incarnation is common in this section of the city. Little incised designs often decorate the lintels.
This building would have matched its neighbor originally, but at some point the storefront was filled in to make an apartment. Now that Penn Main is becoming a desirable neighborhood, the alteration might be reversed.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Two quite different houses. The one on the left is a duplex, though it may have been built as a single-family house. The one on the right is a kind of lean-to parasite on its larger neighbor, uncharacteristically set back from the street so that it has a front yard and a porch, as if someone was trying to create a little country house in the city.
This picture only: Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This one is getting a going-over. Father Pitt would prefer to see more original-looking windows, but at least the size of the windows has not been altered, and any future owner who feels motivated will be able to replace them with proper double-hung two-over-two sash windows.
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’Tis Autumn
These are all pictures taken directly from the camera without any processing—as close to unmediated natural beauty as photography can give you. They were taken in Bird Park, Mount Lebanon, and near the Montour Trail, Moon Township.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
Hotel Hall, McKees Rocks
The painted signs identifying this as the Hotel Hall are still clearly legible. It’s a fairly large version of the typical Pittsburgh hotel: bar on the ground floor, rooms upstairs.
The most interesting feature of the hotel is its corner entrance with iron brackets.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
Old Store in Imperial
Here is an exceptionally well-preserved country store, complete with oversized signboard.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. 
Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film. -
More of Robin Hill, Moon Township
The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.
Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285. More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.
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Apartment Buildings on Broadway Avenue, Dormont
The northwest side of Broadway Avenue in Dormont is lined with small to medium-sized apartment buildings and duplexes. There’s a variety of styles, but we suspect more than one of them came from the pencil of Charles Geisler, who designed many apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, and who lived not far away in Beechview.
These two are exceptionally convenient to transit: their front doors open right across from the Stevenson stop on the Red Line.
Nikon COOLPIX P100. -
Hornbostel Goes Maya in South Park
The Maya produced some of the great architectural geniuses of the ancient world. In 1907, the architect Henry Hornbostel made a trip to Yucatan, where he was one of the first people to photograph the ancient Maya structures. In 1938, when he was director of parks for Allegheny County, Hornbostel produced this startling corbeled arch—a distinctive feature of Maya architecture—for the golf clubhouse in South Park.
Reliefs cleverly assembled from bricks show men and women having fun on the golf course. When old Pa Pitt visited, the men playing golf outnumbered women by at least ten to one, but in these reliefs the sexes come in equal numbers. In half the men swing and the women watch, and in the other half vice versa.
The interior decorations continue the abstract-Maya theme.
In his much-quoted talk on “American Style,” the eccentric genius and flimflam artist Titus de Bobula advised his fellow architects, “Go back to our own archeological excavations of Yucatan and Mexico,” where they would find inspiration for a truly American style. He earned some applause, but only a very few American architects followed that advice, producing a small treasury of “Mayan Revival” architecture. This may be the only unambiguous example in Pittsburgh. It took Hornbostel three decades from the time he visited Yucatan to the time he drew this Maya-inspired building, and it was at the end of his career. Perhaps the Maya style was too adventurous for Pittsburgh. But it gave us this one memorable clubhouse, and we can be thankful for that.
Sony Alpha 3000.
