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Saw Mill Run at Seldom Seen
We saw the movie version yesterday, and now here are two still pictures of the vigorously moving Saw Mill Run at Seldom Seen.
And here is a picture of the path leading toward the Arch and the railroad viaducts:
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Lillian Henius House, Highland Park
Built in 1918, this very artistic house was designed for an artist by Kiehnel & Elliott, who applied everything Richard Kiehnel had learned from the German Jugendstil masters and made a kind of modernist Bavarian peasant cottage. Kiehnel & Elliott were among our most interesting early modernists; they would go on to make architectural history by introducing Art Deco to Miami.
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Saw Mill Run After the Storms
Heavy rains left streams gushing and rivers overflowing. Go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page for an HD version.
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Bridges at Night
The Three Sisters bridges have a new lighting scheme. Above, the Roberto Clemente or Sixth Street Bridge; below, the Andy Warhol or Seventh Street Bridge.
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Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children, Oakland
George S. Orth was the architect of this palace of education, which was finished in 1894. It’s a little bit Flemish Renaissance, with eye-catching horizontal stripes and Rundbogenstil eyebrows over the arches.
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The Strawberry Way Time Machine
At the intersection of two impossibly narrow alleys downtown is a little remnant of old Pittsburgh from before the age of skyscrapers, and even before the age of six-storey Victorian palaces of commerce. This is the only place downtown where you can get a hint of what back-alley Pittsburgh looked like when the city was mostly confined to the Triangle, and every square foot was inhabited. All the back alleys were crowded with little houses like these. The two tiny two-storey houses may date from as late as the 1880s, when they seem to have replaced frame houses of roughly equal dimensions; but they were built in an indeterminate vernacular style that would not have looked out of place in the Pittsburgh of a hundred years earlier. The taller building on the corner is older, and we can see by the patchwork of bricks that it once had a tiny storefront with a corner entrance.
As small as the building is, and as wide as the lens is on old Pa Pitt’s Fuji HS10, it was still necessary to make a composite picture to get the whole Montour Way front of this little house. Please forgive a bit of glare at the top: the sun was behind the building.
The taller houses behind the tiny ones were preserved by being converted into part of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club in 1930.
Today these buildings give us something unique squashed between the looming skyscrapers: one block of the old Pittsburgh, as it looked before the great expansion after the Civil War. We hope they can be preserved. Right now they seem to be in no danger; the Allegheny HYP club is still going, and the other buildings are inhabited by a tailor so exclusive that a small sign on a back alley suffices for advertising.
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Renaissance Palace in Schenley Farms
Louis Stevens was best known as a designer of romantic châteaux and French cottages for the well-to-do, but if you asked him for a Renaissance palace, he was up to the task. The Harry J. Parker house was built in 1915 on a prominent corner where Bayard Street meets Bigelow Boulevard, and it is a standout in a neighborhood of splendid houses.
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The Embassy, Mount Lebanon
A simple and dignified modernistic apartment building with tasteful Art Deco ornamentation. It is now an assisted-living facility.
