This pretty and whimsical house would be right at home in Mission Hills or Beverly Heights, but here it is on a pleasant back street in Sheraden. The original windows add much to its appeal—God, as Mr. Mies said, is in the details. The porch is a classic of the Fairy-Tale Style.
Bartberger, Cooley & Bartberger were the architects of this dignified little school, built in 1911. The Bartbergers were Charles M. Bartberger and his brother Edward, and Cooley was C. D. Cooley, who would later establish his home nearby in Brookline. The school has been converted to apartments under the name Gualtieri Manor.
William J. Shaw was the architect of the most prominent commercial block in Sheraden, built in 1904 or 1905 for Sheraden’s own self-made developer, contractor, and civic luminary John Murphy.1 The details are mostly Renaissance; but the heavily eyebrowed arches and weighty and elaborate cornice make the term “Rundbogenstil” appropriate, giving us another chance to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”
This is a classic Pittsburgh “flatiron” building, with the classic Pittsburgh problem of three dimensions of irregularity in the lot. To the right the ground slopes precipitously down to the Sheraden station—a railroad station when it was built, a busway station now that the West Busway has duplicated the old Panhandle commuter route to the western suburbs.
We considered taking those utility cables out. After a couple of experiments, we realized it would require more hand-painting than we were willing to do.
A pilaster base on the sharp corner with oversized egg-and-dart ornamentation.
A Renaissance false balcony with egg-and-dart, dentils, and balusterasters in relief. Old Pa Pitt had to invent the term “balusteraster” to describe these false balusters, and now that he has invented it he will use it wherever appropriate. We can see that this building keeps a sharp eye on the complicated and confusing every-which-way intersection outside; possibly the most amusing videos are posted to some YouTube channel.
Inscription on the Hillsboro Street side.
Even the tiniest houses could be romanticized in the age of what Father Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style of domestic architecture. The little bungalow above and the mirror-image cottages below probably date from the 1930s. A coating of snow helps the fairy-tale atmosphere.
Except for the replaced and filled-in porch, this house is in remarkably good shape, with most of its characteristic details intact. By chance the Pittsburgh City Photographer happened to capture it on May 27, 1910, while it was still under construction, so we can compare its current state to what it looked like when it was new.
Pittsburgh Railways, the streetcar conglomerate, had a big facility here in Glenwood (the southern end of what city planning maps mark as Hazelwood) with a car barn and this station and offices. The complex was adjacent to the Glenwood station on the B&O, where there was a large railroad yard with a roundhouse.
The building is now the Hazelwood Healthy Active Living Community Center, so it has been restored and is kept in exceptionally neat condition.
A typical Pittsburgh Foursquare, just like hundreds of others in Beechview and thousands upon thousands in the city and inner suburbs, except that by random chance we happen to know the architect of this one: William Wolfshafer (or Wolfschaffer; like many German architects in Pittsburgh, he had a German and an Anglicized spelling of his name). He was a fairly successful architect, to judge by the occasional substantial apartment buildings we find with his name attached, and he was obviously capable of delivering just the kind of conservative but up-to-date house merchant-class Pittsburghers craved. Note the well-preserved classical details in the dormer.
Four different houses in four different styles. We begin with the biggest: a Georgian mansion with a gambrel roof, built a little before 1910.
A classic foursquare on a generous scale, with “modern Ionic” porch columns and classical detailing in the dormer and oriel.
This “old English” design has some fancy brickwork and even fancier woodwork in the gable, partly obscured by vines.
Finally, an eclectic design of the type Pa Pitt often calls “center-hall foursquare,” with a harmonious mixture of influences from Georgian to Prairie Style.
Built as a branch bank, this tidy little modernistic building seems to be succeeding in its second life as a little neighborhood grocery. It is one of several “flatiron” buildings in Sheraden, and old Pa Pitt had to stand in the middle of a fairly busy intersection to get this picture of the sharp end:
