Now the Historic State Avenue Apartments, this old YMCA was designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1910. The style is a rich Georgian that makes the place look like a high-class resort hotel.
Even the alcoves for trash and utility equipment have a rich Colonial look.
This short alley no longer has a street sign, but it still appears on maps as Charette Way, which seems like a peculiar name for an alley.
A “charette” is a term well known to architects: it’s a session of intense work to meet a deadline. Supposedly it comes from the charrette or cart that used to come around to collect the drawings at the French architectural schools, with the students frantically putting the final touches on their work as the cart rumbled along. The magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club for many years was called The Charette.
In 1928, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club got itself club rooms with an entrance on the right-hand side of this tiny alley, and with the aid of some friends in government, Charles Stotz, the club president, managed to have the alley renamed “Charette Way.”
From the January, 1929, issue of The Charette, we reprint the story of the name.
The passer-by will notice a new street sign marking the little alley leading off Cecil Place. To many the name will mean nothing more than another odd street name. To the few who recognize the French origin of the word it will seem to be quite appropriate with the store trucks constantly entering and leaving the picturesque little street, but for those interested in using the attractive doorway entering off the right side of the alley, the name “Charette Way” has considerable significance. It is a curious fact that the Architectural Club is not only in possession of an ideally central down-town location, but has also been able to christen the alley which it fronts. We direct the attention of the skeptics to the City Ordinance reproduced herewith. The prompt execution of this bit of business is due to the cooperation of Councilman W. Y. English, to whom the Club at its last meeting extended a unanimous vote of thanks.
AN ORDINANCE—Naming an Unnamed Way lying between Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue and running from Fifth Avenue to The Rosenbaum property line, “Charette Way.”
SECTION 1. Be it ordained and enacted by the City of Pittsburgh, in Council assembled, and it is hereby ordained and enacted by the authority of the same. That an Unnamed Way lying between Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue and running from Fifth Avenue to The Rosenbaum property line, be and the same is named “Charette Way.”
SECTION 2. That any Ordinance or part of Ordinance conflicting with the provisions of this ordinance be and the same is hereby repealed so are as the same affects this Ordinance.
Addendum: Thanks to a kind correspondent, we were directed to this article on Coraopolis history, where the architect of the VFW post is identified as T. Ed. Cornelius—an old friend of ours who always kept up with the latest styles and executed them well. The article as originally written follows.
Father Pitt does not know the history of this building, but it is certainly a fine outcropping of Art Deco, and very well preserved in nearly its original state.
The building stands at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Mulberry Street in Coraopolis.
The Mulberry Street side has its own entrance, and this part of the building may date from a different time—but not very different, since it is also in an uncompromising Art Deco style.
A cornerstone on the Mulberry Street side dates at least this part of the building to 1941.
The architect (or the bricklayer) was someone who understood the effects of shadows, creating geometric patterns in light and dark by arranging bricks at different angles.
Old Pa Pitt enjoys pointing out the many ways architects and builders have answered the terrace question. “This method of building three or six houses under one roof shows a handsome return on the money invested,” said an article about a terrace of houses in Brighton Heights, but the investment pays off only if tenants are willing to move in. The later Aluminum City Terrace development in New Kensington, designed in a starkly modern style by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, had a hard time attracting tenants in spite of cheap rents and an acute housing shortage, because locals thought it looked yucky.
The terrace question, then, is this: How can we build economical housing that is nevertheless attractive enough to seem desirable to tenants?
This terrace obviously had a higher budget than many, so it answered the question with fine design, elaborate decoration, and good materials. The materials were good enough that they have survived intact more than a century: these houses on Denniston Street, twenty-four of them in four rows of six each, were put up before 1923, but they still have their tile roofs and other decorative elements.
Probably because of the steep hill they occupy, these houses have unusually generous front yards—generous enough for a whole container vegetable garden, for instance.
The Fulton Building was one of a pair of buildings designed for Henry Phipps by New York architect Grosvenor Atterbury; the complementary but not identical Bessemer Building has long since been replaced by a parking garage. In the close view of the light well above, we can see how much thought went into sucking up every photon for the interior offices. Those bays take in light from every possible angle. In many of our prominent buildings, the light well is hidden in the back, but in the Fulton Building it is made the characteristic feature of the front that faces the river.
The picture above was taken in 2015, before the Renaissance Hotel put a sign at the top of the building.
The name on the marquee is new, but the marquee itself came with the building. It is attached to the wall with a pair of steampunk chimeras:
Elaborate chains supporting the marquee are attached to these monogram brackets:
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Olympus E-20n.
This is the edge of the section locals call Billy Buck Hill, the bulge in the Slopes enclosed by a long loop of South 18th Street. These houses along South 18th Street were built shortly before 1910, according to old maps; they are a little grander than some of their neighbors behind them, and they are good exercises in urban archaeology. Not one of them is in original condition, but we can probably reconstruct what they looked like when they were new by comparing the houses.
First, four out of the five share a blank spot in the wall above the front door that seems unusual. You would expect a window there. The fifth has a window, though it’s an odd oval shape. Nevertheless, that oval window appears to be original. We can tell nothing from the third and fourth houses in the row, which have had their entire fronts replaced with fake stone, but a close look at the first and second houses (enlarge the picture to examine them) shows that the bricks in the front walls have been filled in just where such a window would be, and in a roughly oval shape.
That projecting second-floor window on the fifth house is also unusual, but here old Pa Pitt is inclined to say it is probably not original. It looks like a local contractor’s more modern renovation. The second house is probably the only one that preserves the original shapes of its windows upstairs and downstairs, although the windows themselves have been replaced.
All the dormers have been renovated in various ways, but the ones on the first and fifth houses may be closest to what all the dormers originally looked like.
The first and fifth houses also preserve their original chimneys. Two of the others have lost their tops, and the chimney on the third house has been rebuilt from the same stone substitute that was used for the front.
Three of the houses have aluminum awnings. The ones on the second and third houses are genuine Kool-Vent.
Academy Avenue in Mount Lebanon has a mixture of single-family homes and small to medium-sized apartment buildings. We have seen some of the apartment buildings before; here are a few more.
We saw the building above once before; here it is in a different light at a different time of year. The architect was probably Charles Geisler, and buildings in variations of this same basic plan are all over Mount Lebanon and Dormont.
This is a tidy double duplex in very close to original condition. The little details make all the difference in its appearance: the tile roof overhangs, the proper windows for the era, and the little German-art-magazine ornaments in the brickwork.
Cameras: Nikon COOLPIX P100, Kodak EasyShare Z1285.
This has the look of a “hotel” in the Pittsburgh sense: a bar with rooms upstairs, thus qualifying for the much more readily available hotel liquor license. It still has a bar on the ground floor. The style is what old Pa Pitt calls “South Hills German Victorian,” and indeed a glance at the plat maps shows that this part of the Slopes was thoroughly German when this building went up shortly before 1910. The whole triangle bounded by South 18th Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Street (now Monastery Avenue) was owned by Elizabeth Lenert.
When your building has an acute angle, but not sharply acute, one way of dealing with it is to put the entrance there and make the corner into a feature rather than something that looks like an unfortunate necessity. The rocket-shaped turret on this building acts like a hinge to make it feel as though the building was meant to fold into this shape.
Otherwise, this is not an elaborate building, but the clever arrangement of bricks at the top of the 18th Street side makes an attractive cornice that doesn’t fall down.
We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.
The building would have had a much more dignified and balanced appearance before the ground-floor storefront was filled in; but since a corner bar is close in spirit to a men’s club, patrons should be grateful that it has windows at all.
Father Pitt believes this is one of our Peregrine Falcons, but he is always willing to be corrected. It posed on this chimney for quite a while, running through its repertoire of avian expressions.
Camera: Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
Whenever you see rows of identical double houses like these in a suburban area or out in the country, you have run across an old mining town. The houses were usually built all at once to provide housing for the workers, who would live on the property of the mining company and be paid in scrip accepted at the company store, and thus have strong incentive to remain loyal employees rather than homeless paupers. These little houses were built very cheap, but often under the supervision of a skillful architect who knew how to make cheap permanent.
Mollenauer, now part of the municipality of Bethel Park, was built in 1902 by the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Company for workers in its Mine No. 3. After the mine passed into private ownership, the houses were sold off individually. Originally the houses on a street all looked the same—though the steep hill forced some adaptations, as we see on 1st Street above, where houses on one side have basements with ground-level street entrances, and houses on the other side have their front porches down several steps from the street.
With separate owners, the houses in a pair often end up going their separate ways as if they hardly knew each other. The one on the left side of this pair looks as though it has fallen into the hands of house-flippers.
A 1934 plat map shows us how the village was laid out.
Mollenauer is a short stroll from the Washington Junction station.
