The central warehouse for the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad’s freight depot, now converted to offices and other uses and known as Commerce Court. These two pictures were taken just about a year apart, but nothing significant changed during that time. While he was donating the newer one to Wikimedia Commons, old Pa Pitt ran across the older one and realized he had never published it here.
It is the northeastern corner of Shadyside now, but this house was built in the neighborhood that developed around the East Liberty station, which was not far from where the East Liberty station is today—now a busway station, but on the same route. This house was built in the 1880s for a family named McCully, to judge by old maps. It has been divided into three apartments, but it has kept many of its 1880s details.
This entrance is probably a replacement for a front porch that ran the width of the building.
The original carved wooden brackets include the abstract cutout botanical decorations that were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s
Thomas Scott designed this terrace of four houses, built in 1912,1 and they are kept in remarkably fine shape. The updates have been handled with taste and an understanding of the original style, so that today there is hardly a finer Beaux-Arts terrace of cheap little rowhouses in the city. We have talked before about the challenge of making inexpensive housing seem attractive; it was a challenge that Scott met and conquered.
The doors of the two end units are framed in scrupulously proper Doric fashion.
The two inner units have these unique sawed-off arches over their front doors.
From a distance, we can see how densely built Dormont is. It’s in the top 1% of municipalities by population density in the United States. Yet the streets never feel crowded or claustrophobic. That pleasant and efficient use of land is the reason why Father Pitt, without any irony, likes to talk about the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development.
The St. George congregation moved out of this little backstreet church a few years ago, building a much larger and more splendid church, with gilded domes and everything, just south of Bridgeville. A nondenominational congregation has taken it over and keeps the building in good shape. All the stained glass was removed when the building changed hands—except for Father Pitt’s favorite window, which was removed by the Antiochians themselves a few years before they left. It was in the lunette above the front door: a staring eye in glass, with the legend The eye of God is upon you.
Hazelwood was a famously Hungarian neighborhood, and several kinds of Hungarian churches sprouted there. The cornerstone of this church was laid one hundred years ago today on December 20, 1925, but it’s not much different in front from the vernacular Gothic churches of half a century earlier.
If we walk around the side of this church, though, we see what is really unusual about it: it grows out of a big old Italianate house built in the 1870s.
The new building was dedicated on May 16, 1926.
The congregation is long gone, but the church now belongs to an organization called “Center of Life.”
The old house has some very fine woodwork, which we hope can be preserved.
Some of the stained glass has fallen to pieces. It is expensive to restore stained glass, but the Union Project in Highland Park made restoring stained glass a community-education project, with spectacular results.
In a city architectural inventory of Brookline, Knowlson Avenue between McNeilly and Dorchester was singled out as a potential historic district.
Knowlson Avenue is a two-block-long, brick-paved street lined with Craftsman Style houses. Their design and integrity make Knowlson Avenue an excellent representative concentration of the Craftsman Style residential character integral to Brookline. While the types of houses are similar to those found in the rest of the neighborhood, the level of integrity, and therefore the articulation of the houses’ original materials and design, is greater here than in any other contiguous area in Brookline.… Beyond its buildings, Knowlson Avenue’s brick-paved street and mature street trees contribute to its strong evocation of Brookline as it appeared ca. 1930.
That made it seem worth a visit, so last week, when old Pa Pitt happened to be in Brookline for other reasons, he made a pilgrimage to this street. It really is an unusually fine collection of houses, and the brick pavement does add to the laid-back atmosphere. (Among other things, bricks encourage drivers to slow down.)
The sun was shining from directly behind the houses on the southwest side of the street, so those will have to wait for another day. But Father Pitt has photographed every single house on the northeast side of the two blocks the architectural inventory mentioned, and here they are.
This picturesque corner cottage in a style the architect probably called “French” actually faces Dorchester Avenue, but it is addressed to Knowlson Avenue, so it counts.
From the birth of Christ to the evolution of the first giant inflatable took nearly two thousand years. How did Christmas happen in all that time?
To avoid weighing down the front page, we’ll put the rest of the pictures behind a link, so that you actually have to decide to look at them.
This dignified Renaissance mansion was built earlier than the rest of the houses on its street, probably in about 1900, when it would have been just about the finest house in the up-and-coming borough of Sheraden. It has been turned into apartments, but the exterior details are well maintained.
The architect had fun drawing this front entrance, and we praise the current owners for keeping it in good shape.
A typical Pittsburgh corner building—typical especially in that the corner is not a right angle. Some of the details are well preserved, including the elaborate decorative brickwork in the cornice and the signboard above the storefront, ready for some local artist to inscribe the next tenant’s name in paint.
One of many similar houses in Shadyside. The light was right this afternoon for this particular one, so here it is.
