This magnificent home was built for the Robinson family, probably in the 1890s, on a prominent corner facing the East Commons. It replaced an earlier brick house that had stood on the same spot. Locals tell us it is magnificent on the inside as well. One claims to have a mantel from this house in his own house: the Robinson house spent decades as a funeral home, and when the owners tore out interior walls, they offered some of the remains to the neighbors.
This church, built in 1895, is a fine example of what old Pa Pitt would call Pittsburgh Rundbogenstil, because he likes to say “Rundbogenstil.” Otherwise we would just have to call it “Romanesque,” and where’s the fun in that? It now belongs to Riverside Community Church.
An old postcard shows us that little has changed about the building in more than a century.
The 40th Street or Washington Crossing Bridge, in a picture taken a year and a half ago but somehow lost in the debris until now. In the right foreground is the Bair & Gazzam Building.
Pembroke Place is a street of unusually fine houses in the very rich part of Shadyside. We have already seen the Acheson House; here is a generous album of other houses on the street.
Is there a household in America that does not keep a stock of AA batteries? Or AAA, C, D? These are reliable power sources that we just drop into electrically powered devices without a moment’s thought.
You owe that convenience to the Hipwell Manufacturing Company of North Avenue. It was Hipwell that invented the unit-cell battery (see this ad-laden page and this PDF history), thus taming the demon electricity and even giving him a goofy smile.
Until a few years ago, this building still had old advertising posters in the windows, which luckily Father Pitt recorded before they disappeared.
This buff-brick building also belonged to the Hipwell Manufacturing Co, and it was featured as the Hipwell factory in company advertising—but in a form we can only call fictionalized.
The distinctive alternating round and flattened arches are there, but there are twice as many of them. The building was never this size, nor was there ever a railroad siding where boxcars were stuffed with Hipco flashlights and batteries.
The old Hipwell factory kept turning out flashlights until 2005, which accounts for its fortunate state of preservation. It is now an event venue called Hip at the Flashlight Factory.
Two firehouses went up back to back at the same time in 1900. The much more elaborate Engine Company No. 1 was built on Second Avenue, now the Boulevard of the Allies. Behind it on First Avenue was Engine Company No. 30, designed by the same architect—William Y. Brady—and built at the same time. Why they counted as two separate firehouses instead of one big firehouse is a question for the fire department.
An elegant Tudor or Jacobean mansion designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1903, as the dormer tells us. This Post-Gazette story (reprinted in a Greenville, North Carolina, paper that does not keep it behind a paywall) tells us that a 1925 addition was designed by Benno Janssen, who had worked in the MacClure & Spahr office and may have had some responsibility for the original design. The article also tells us how vandals masquerading as interior designers rampaged through the house and painted all the interior woodwork white or pale grey to “banish dark wood,” but at least the exterior is in good shape.
Kale is a biennial. If you let some kale overwinter, it will give you cheery yellow mustard flowers in the spring, which will produce the seeds for another crop of kale.
