The Boulevard of the Allies side of one of the side-by-side Hartje Brothers buildings. Charles Bickel designed this building and the matching one behind it on Wood Street. This was the later of the two, both built in 1902 for the Hartje Brothers Paper Manufacturing Company. Mr. Bickel was extraordinarily prolific, but old Pa Pitt thinks he deserved his success. For an interesting comparison, look at the Reymer Brothers candy factory and the Concordia Club, and see how Charles Bickel created different effects from the same basic shapes.
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historic marker at the entrance tells us all Father Pitt knows about St. James Terrace: that it was built in 1915, and that the builder was John E. Born. Perhaps we will discover the architect one of these days.
St. James Terrace is an enclave within an enclave: it branches off the narrow dead-end St. James Place, but with no access for vehicles. Instead, the houses are arranged around a narrow but beautiful garden court, which looks very romantic in the snow.
This grand mansion was built in about 1890 for railroad magnate Harry Darlington. It occupies a tiny lot, so it is one room wide—but four storeys tall and half a block deep.
The building is decorated with numerous terra-cotta tiles with fine scrolly foliage.
A carriage house in the back has matching stony foundations.
Several of these houses have fallen into the hands of house-flippers, which means that they have been made presentable with cheap materials that disguise the architects’ original intentions. But we can be grateful that they were rescued by capitalism from otherwise certain decay and demolition.
We begin with a design that, from certain angles, looks almost like a stretched bungalow. The part that is covered with vinyl siding was probably wood-shingled, although it went through a half-timber-and-stucco period that might also have been the original plan.
Here is a tidy little bungalow with no stretching at all, and it seems to retain almost all its original Arts-and-Crafts style.
Nothing says “flipped house” like vinyl siding and snap-on shutters for the windows. But the twin gables with swooping extended roofline show us the romantic fairy-tale cottage the architect meant this house to be. The top half, again, was probably wood-shingled; more recently it was covered with asbestos-cement shingles.
This unusual house brings more than a hint of the Prairie Style to the back streets of Dormont. Plastic cartoon shutters again, but those could be removed by the next enlightened owner, leaving an exterior almost completely original. The patterned brickwork is eye-catching without being garish.
The sunroom protruding from the front was probably an open porch when the house was built.
Many of the apartment buildings in the East End sold a kind of architectural fantasy to prospective residents. The Georgian went the obvious step further and named itself after its own architectural style. It adapts Georgian elements with some success to the configuration of a large city apartment house, arranged around a pleasant garden court. The needs of the automobile, however, mean that the dominant impression as we read the name of the building in front is of a blank metal door. Father Pitt decided to crop out the garage door for the picture of the court below.
These buildings, put up in 2007, were one of the early signs of revival in Garfield. Father Pitt took this picture eight years ago, but it seems that he never published it here, so you might as well see it now.
Mission Hills in Mount Lebanon was laid out in 1921 as an ideally picturesque automobile suburb. The lots were sold off individually, so that each buyer hired his own architect and builder. The result is a delightful variety of styles that all fit comfortably together. We’ll take a look at a couple of those houses individually later, but right now here is a big album of Mission Hills houses in the snow.
To keep from weighing down the front page, we’ll put the rest of the pictures behind a “read more” link.
Colonial Place is one of those tiny enclaves all built at once in which Shadyside abounds. This one was built in 1898, and it is unique in that the entrance is flanked by two grand mansions.
George S. Orth was the architect of almost all the houses in Colonial Place. (See if you can guess which house old Pa Pitt thinks was not part of the original plan.) Mr. Orth had a prosperous career designing mansions for the wealthy, as well as some large institutions like the School for Blind Children. But he seems to have been forgotten faster than most Pittsburgh architects. He died in 1918; ten years later, when the architect George Schwan died at 55, his obituary in the Charette had to remind readers who Orth was: “He [Schwan] was trained in the office of George S. Orth, old time architect of Pittsburgh…” That is all the more remarkable because the Charette was the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, of all groups the one that would be most likely to remember George S. Orth.
At any rate, Colonial Place is still a remarkably pleasant little street. The landscaping was done by E. H. Bachman, and the sycamores he planted still shade the street in summer and make a striking avenue in the winter with their stark white branches and trunks.
This mansion is currently the residence of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Pittsburgh.
This one is currently for sale, and you can tour the interior on Google Street View (push the “Browse Street View images” standing-figure button to reveal little blue dots all over the house).
As the business district along Penn Avenue becomes a more and more desirable place for artsy shops and galleries, it has been cheering to see many old buildings cleaned up and given new life in Garfield. Here is one of the finest. Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about it other than that its name is Butler.
