A week or so ago we saw a fairy-tale palace by Paul Scheuneman in Cedarhurst Manor. That house is perhaps the grandest in the plan, but some others are not far behind. Several other fine houses went up in the 1930s; they must have been even more like fairy-tale palaces in their first years, since much of Cedarhurst Manor was sparsely settled until after the Second World War, and these houses would have loomed suddenly out of the woods. They are in different styles, but they all share that prioritizing of the picturesque that is the hallmark of what Father Pitt calls the fairy-tale style of the 1920s and 1930s. Above and below, what Pittsburghers call a Normandy, with a turret cozily tucked into its corner.
This house is of more modest dimensions, and it is similar to many other houses that went up in the suburbs during the Depression. (Many of them were designed by Joseph Hoover, a prolific producer of fairy-tale cottages who went full-on Moderne when he turned to commercial projects: he was the architect of the first Pittsburgh International Airport.) Here we see how the fairy-tale style has filtered down to the middle of the middle class: you may be limited in your resources, but you can still have the little cottage of your childhood dreams. Father Pitt suspects the half-timbered gable has been simplified from an original that would have had more timber.
Old Pa Pitt had meant to publish these pictures a little before Christmas, but he lost track of them. And since he doesn’t want to wait till next year, here they are now. This is the Negley-Gwinner-Harter House in Shadyside, with a crew installing its Christmas ribbon. This was the house that sat derelict for years after a disastrous fire, so it is always a cheerful sight when Father Pitt walks past and sees it in fine shape like this. But it is even more cheerful all tied up in a Christmas bow.
Colonial revival had passed from a fashion to a mania by the 1930s, with the restoration of Williamsburg capturing the American imagination with visions of an elegant Georgian past. Small federal buildings, especially post offices, almost always adopted the Georgian style—as we see in this modest post office with its neat Georgian entrance, complete with fanlight. The post office has moved to larger quarters, but the building is kept in original shape by its current occupants.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Strip was a chaotic and lively mess of huge industries, small business, and rowhouses. Few of the houses remain; here is one of the surviving rows. These are what old Pa Pitt calls Baltimore-style rowhouses: a row where the houses are all put up as more or less one building, flush up against the sidewalk, with only a set of steps to the front door to separate them from the city outside. These were built as rental houses, probably in the 1890s or very early 1900s; they were still all under the same ownership in 1923, according to old maps. At first they had small back yards on the alley in the rear, but by 1910 those back yards had been filled in with tiny alley houses, which are still there today, and some day when it isn’t so cold old Pa Pitt will walk around to the alley and get their picture, too.
Surprisingly, all the houses in the original group survive. The house on the right end had its front completely rebuilt about ten years ago; the fourth house from the left has had a “picture window” installed in the parlor. The rest of the houses look more or less the way they have always looked.
Cedarhurst Manor began to fill up in about 1930, though much of it was empty until after the Second World War. The block of Firwood Avenue just off Bower Hill Road has a representative mixture of houses from the 1930s and early 1940s. Since it was a dim day anyway, we present these pictures in black and white, which makes it easy to compare the forms and masses of the houses without being distracted by details of color.
This house seems to have been a builder’s standard design; it is almost identical except in material to the house next to it.
This house, built in 1925, was designed by Charles Tattersall Ingham, according to an article in the Trib from back in September. Ingham was half of the firm of Ingham & Boyd, a big deal around here—they designed many of our biggest schools, including all the schools in Mount Lebanon for decades. Both Ingham and Boyd had a mania for symmetry. They also had a taste for the classical in architecture, but they disliked columns. It takes all kinds.
But why is it called the “Blinker House”? The Trib article explains that it sits at a very complicated five-way intersection, where years ago there used to be a flashing red light. The blinker is long gone, but Pittsburghers have long memories, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it as the Blinker House.
As of this writing, the house is for sale, and the asking price is a little under 2½ million dollars—down from 2.6 million when the Trib article was written.
Murdoch Farms, a dairy farm until the early twentieth century, is the most expensive section of Squirrel Hill. In the 1920s it filled up with mansions designed by our leading architects, and most of them are still in close to original shape, at least on the outside. Father Pitt took a stroll on a dim and snowy afternoon to get a few pictures.
The Tower at PNC Plaza will be ten years old this year. It occurred to Father Pitt that he had enough pictures in his collection to make up a visual story of the construction of the building, so here they are. Above, the progress as of February 18, 2014.
June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.
Edward Stotz was the architect of this auditorium, built in 1928. It was the centerpiece of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, which was founded by the Kaufmanns of Kaufmann’s department store to memorialize a daughter who died young; its purpose was to serve the poor immigrants of the Hill.
This was a warehouse, with offices and showrooms, built in 1907 for a company that sold a wide variety of products, from ball-bearing grinders to home appliances—including, according to a comment below, an automobile called the Duquesne, which never made it into full production, and about which Father Pitt would like to hear more from anyone who has information. (Note, by the way, that the company’s owners were among the many stubborn Pittsburghers who kept the H at the end of the city’s name through the dark days when it was officially banned.) Its 1913 catalogue is more than two thousand pages, and the title page shows us why so much effort went into making this industrial building attractive: because it had to look good in the engraving.
This picture—which is probably the architects’ rendering, since the same picture shows up in other sources even before the building was completed—shows the building before it was expanded. The architects were the William G. Wilkins Co., designers of numerous warehouses and industrial buildings in Pittsburgh, including the Frick & Lindsey Co. warehouse, now the Andy Warhol Museum. The addition to the left of the building was built in 1919 or 1920; the same architects supervised it, so it matches the rest very neatly. William Glyde Wilkins was an engineer; to do the architecting in his firm, he had the very capable Joseph F. Kuntz, who loved terra-cotta decoration.
One important line the company sold was the Gainaday brand of home appliances. In the early part of the twentieth century, middle-class families were learning to live without servants. It meant the housewife had to do the work previously done by maids and housekeepers. But this was the mechanical age: a machine could take the place of a servant. It was so efficient, in fact, that you could gain a day over the course of your week of housewifely duties.
The building was promoted as a “model warehouse,” a shining example of what could be done with this sort of building, and Pittsburgh’s Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, the biggest name in toilets (which later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard), took out a full-page ad in a journal of the toilet trade to boast that the plumbing fixtures were all Standard brand.
The magazine Rock Products for November 22, 1907, gave a detailed description of the building as it was going up, with—once again—the same illustration.
Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company.
The immense building now being erected by the Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company at Thirtieth Street and Liberty Avenue, Pittsburg, Pa., is constructed of steel, brick and concrete fireproofing, equipped with automatic sprinklers throughout, and when completed will be the largest, most modern and thoroughly equipped supply house in the world.
For the concrete work Lehigh Portland cement was used throughout. The W. G. Wilkins Company, Westinghouse Building, were the architects, and the George Hogg Company the contractors.
The first floor will be used as a general salesroom; the second floor will be taken up by the offices and shipping departments of the company. All the other floors and the basement will be used as storage space for their mammoth stock. A notable feature of the main building is the central_tower rising more than forty feet above the roof. In this tower will be located water tanks holding 65,000 gallons, which will be used for the house supply and the automatic sprinkler system.
In connection with the building there is being erected a six-story fireproof building, in which will be manufactured the Pittsburg steam specialties. It will also contain a thoroughly modern brass foundry and pipe shop. Electric cranes are to be used throughout, and all machinery, elevators, etc., will be electric-motor-driven.
A joint siding of the Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio and Pittsburg Junction railroads will afford excellent shipping facilities. Adjoining this siding they are constructing a large iron, steel and pipe warehouse, in which will be carried the largest stock in Pittsburg, if not in the Central States. Adjoining this building there is a vacant frontage of almost 100 feet, which will be used for storage and switching purposes.
The present stores and warehouses of the Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company are located at 309-321 Water Street, and its manufacturing plant at Thirty-first Street. The officers are: W. L. Rodgers, president; J. Lee Rodgers, secretary; R. F. Ramsey, treasurer; A. F. Maxwell, assistant treasurer; M. R. Porter, sales manager, and H. E. Haller, superintendent.
