This building was put up in two stages. It was built in 1902 as a seven-story building; two years later six more floors were added. Originally it had a cornice and a Renaissance-style parapet at the top, without which it looks a little unfinished.
From The Builder, April 1904. The architect, as we see in the caption, was James T. Steen, who had a thriving practice designing all sorts of buildings, including many prominent commercial blocks downtown. This was probably his largest project.
The gatehouse for the Mount Lebanon Cemetery is a well-preserved vernacular-Gothic frame house. Not all the details have survived—the ugly front door is certainly not original—but more of the original decoration is preserved than we usually see on houses of this type in our area.
An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.
This was built as the Pittsburgh Hilton, which opened in 1959. William Tabler, the house architect for Hilton Hotels, designed the main building, which is a box of square windows. Originally the parts between the windows were gold-colored aluminum, but that was painted over to remove the last trace of anything exciting about the building.
In 2014, after years of delays and a change of ownership, a new lobby addition opened on the front of the building, designed by Stephen Barry of Architectural Design, Inc. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, the addition does not belong on this building. It belongs on a much more interesting building. Here it looks like some sort of parasite attacking the main structure. Nothing about it matches the original building in shape or color, and it is too interesting not to draw attention to itself as something that does not belong here.
A commercial block where someone had a lot of fun with bricks. The storefronts appear to have been updated at some point in the Moderne era.
Warwick House was built in 1910 for Howard Heinz, son of the ketchup king H. J. Heinz. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, who designed several other millionaires’ mansions around here, as well as a number of fine churches. The house now belongs to the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, and it is rented to Opus Dei for a dollar a year, under the condition that the tenants undertake the maintenance, which is enormous.
Once a year the residents throw a big open house, which gave us a chance to get a few pictures. We would have got more, but we were having too much fun.
A French door in the back leading out into the garden.
The rear of the ballroom, an addition built in about 1929. It is now a chapel.
An arbor with some splendid ironwork runs along the back of the garden.
From an earlier visit, we also have several pictures of the interior of Warwick House.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Most of the pictures are HDR stacks of three photographs at different exposures.
This is one of the few remaining churches designed by Joseph W. Kerr, who was one of our top architects in the middle 1800s (he also designed the Shields Chapel nearby in Edgeworth). It opened in 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War.
In Father Pitt’s opinion, Mr. Kerr had good taste. Both this church and the Shields Chapel belong to the middle nineteenth century, but they were never embarrassingly out of date; to the last gasp of the Gothic style in America a hundred years later, an architect familiar with the idiom would have found this a pleasing and successful design.
It is fortunate that the congregation has the money to keep the glorious steeple in excellent shape…
…right up to the iron pinnacle at the top.
Since we saw the Washington Square apartments from the Florida Avenue side a few days ago, it would almost be neglectful to leave out the Washington Road face of the complex. It makes an attempt to fit into an urban streetscape by setting the high-rise apartment tower back from the street, with a low row of shops or offices in front along the sidewalk.
In Father Pitt’s opinion, the attempt is not entirely successful. The modernist style of the shops is uninviting in the most unfortunate sense: it is hard to tell how one is supposed to get into them. Is the entrance in front, or do we drive into a parking lot between them and enter from the lot? But wait—the drive between the shops is an exit only. Can we find the entrance? Should we find the entrance?
Because of the precipitous lot, the Washington Avenue side of the main building is shorter than the Florida Avenue side by several floors.
Albert Spahr of MacClure & Spahr designed the chapel, the administration building, and the gatehouse for the Homewood Cemetery in a Perpendicular Gothic style. (Mr. MacClure had already died, but his name remained at the head of the firm.) The effect is to make us think of our ideal image of an English village.
The doors have impressive iron hinges and pulls.
Here is an extraordinarily rare thing: a tower clock that is keeping accurate time.
The administration building.
The gatehouse appears to have been expanded by a third on the right; the seam is only just visible in the front, but much more obvious in the rear.
Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
