Father Pitt

Tag: Apartment Buildings

A Stroll on Glenmore Avenue in Dormont

A few pictures from a very brief walk after a day of rain. Glenmore Avenue may not be quite as tony as Espy Avenue a block away, but it has its share of elegant homes. As in many other streets in Dormont, the elegant homes are mixed in with pleasant little apartment houses and duplexes—a core principle of what old Pa Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development.

We start with a house that, although it is addressed to Glenmore, actually faces the cross street, Lasalle Avenue.

This Tudor seems to present a modest front to LaSalle Avenue, but turning the corner to Glenmore Avenue reveals a long side of dimensions that would almost qualify it for mansion status.

Next to the Tudor mansion, a symmetrical double house arranged as two Dutch Colonial houses back to back.

A typical Pittsburgh duplex—except that the typical Pittsburgh slope of the lot gives it the opportunity for a third apartment in the basement, with a ground-level entrance on the side street, Key Avenue.

An apartment building that looks like many other small apartment buildings in Dormont. They probably all share the same architect: Charles Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed dozens of buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon.

Even though he has walked on Glenmore Avenue many times before, old Pa Pitt never made this association before now. This is a smaller cottage, but it was clearly designed by the same hand that drew this overgrown bungalow on Mattern Avenue:

This is what you get if you tell your architect, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” The house on Glenmore may originally have had stucco and half-timbering like this: there’s no telling what’s under that aluminum siding.

Canon PowerShot A540; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

This striking house in a subdued version of Prairie Style has been rescued from decay, with tiny plastic paste-on shutters as a signifier of a high-class renovation. Here they are installed behind downspouts, which makes them even more conceptually absurd.

More pictures of Glenmore Avenue.

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January 1, 2025
Scheibler Apartment Building in Highland Park Condemned
After years of neglect and decay, this apartment building in the otherwise prosperous neighborhood of Highland Park is finally condemned.

And it will be a tragedy to lose it, because it is an extraordinary work by an extraordinary architect.

Frederick Scheibler is possibly the most-talked-about architect Pittsburgh ever produced, and this building—put up in 1906 for Mary M. Coleman—marks a turning point in Scheibler’s style, according to his biographer Martin Aurand. “The facade departs from precedent, however, in the sheer strength of its massing, and in its near total lack of common domestic imagery—even a cornice.… There is virtually no exterior ornament at all. The Coleman facade continues a process of abstraction begun at the Linwood [in North Point Breeze], but the leap forward in Scheibler’s developing style is sudden.”¹

Considering the value of real estate in Highland Park right now, restoring this building should be not only public-spirited but also profitable. Is any ambitious developer willing to take it on? That blue sticker isn’t necessarily a death sentence: it will be removed if the dangerous conditions are remediated. To make it easier for you, Scheibler’s original drawings for this building are preserved in the Architecture Archive at Carnegie Mellon, so there need be no guesswork in the restoration.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
1. Martin Aurand, The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr., p. 42 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). ↩︎
December 13, 2024
Martha-Marion Apartments, Mount Lebanon

This fairy-tale palace on Ralston Place preserves most of its charming original details. You will notice right away the most outrageously tall and pointy front gable in the tri-state area (cleverly echoed to give more of an illusion of depth), but after that pause to appreciate the original windows, seldom preserved in apartment buildings of this age, and carefully chosen to balance the other details of the building.

We have some reason to suspect that the plans came from the office of architect Charles Geisler, prolific producer of small and medium-sized apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, as well as Squirrel Hill and elsewhere. If old Pa Pitt finds more specific documentation, he will confirm or revise this attribution.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 10, 2024
Warwick Apartments, Mount Lebanon

A simple but dignified design that preserves its Craftsman-style three-over-one windows.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 7, 2024
The Princess Ann, Mount Lebanon

These splendid marquees with their Art Nouveau lettering in glass welcome us to the Princess Ann, an apartment building in the Colonial Heights plan in Mount Lebanon. Many of the external details of the building are beautifully preserved and maintained, including the art glass on the marquees and in the stairwells.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 3, 2024
Collect ’Em All!

This small apartment building on Overlook Drive in Mount Lebanon is the Maywood.

If you’ve spent any time walking around in the Great State of Mount Lebanon (as Peter Leo used to call it), you might recognize it. But you might not have seen it here. Perhaps you saw it over there:

This is the Meadowbrook on Meadowcroft Avenue.

Or maybe you saw…

The Wil-O-Be on Academy Avenue. Or…

This one on McCully Street was called El Ronson, which is old Pa Pitt’s new favorite name for an apartment building.

Or perhaps you saw…

It seems that this one on Beverly Road had only its address for a name. The lintels are slightly different, and the roof is flat.

And then there’s…

The Harmon, on the left. The Shirley, next to it, is the same basic design, but its variation of the detail strikes us as almost daring after all the others we’ve seen.

We have not exhausted the incarnations of this apartment building, but this should be enough to start your collection. Now you can go out into the streets of Mount Lebanon and keep an eye open, and eventually you may be able to collect the complete set.

November 27, 2024
Castle Stanton, East Liberty

Even though it has lost some decorative details over the years, Castle Stanton still drops jaws of passers-by who find themselves in unfamiliar territory here on the border of East Liberty and Highland Park. It looks like a 1920s Hollywood set: we expect Douglas Fairbanks dressed as Robin Hood to leap from an upstairs window and land on his feet after a series of spectacular acrobatics.

This advertisement from the Pittsburgh Press, September 21, 1930, shows us some of the pointy bits that have since been removed.

This Hollywood front hides an unexpected secret, which will be revealed if we walk around to the side of the building.

Now we see the outlines of an older Queen Anne mansion, converted to an apartment house by the addition of a Hollywood-fantasy front facing Stanton Avenue.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 18, 2024
Second Empire, Meet Spanish Mission

This odd-looking apartment building on Stanton Avenue in Highland Park makes some sense once we peel apart its history. At first old Pa Pitt didn’t know what to make of it, but looking on old plat maps made him realize that the central section was a grand house in the Second Empire style, probably built in the 1870s.

In your imagination, take away those sunrooms on the first and second floors. Add a front porch the width of the house. You might put a Second Empire mansard cupola on the central tower. The result would be a lot like this:

This is Baywood, the Alexander King mansion at the other end of Highland Park (pictures here and here). The house at the core of this apartment building probably looked much like Baywood when it was new. It seems to appear first on the 1882 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps, where the property owner is not identified. In 1890 it is shown as belonging to A. Dempster, and it still belonged to A. Dempster in 1910, with its original outlines. In 1923 it has its current shape, and the owner is shown as G. West.

At some time around World War I, then, when several of the houses on Stanton Avenue were being converted to apartments, someone bought the Dempster mansion and decided to expand it into an apartment building. But the Second Empire style was embarrassingly passé. The new wings were done in an up-to-the-minute Spanish Mission style, and the original house was coated with stucco and modified as much as practical to go with the new style. Nothing, however, could disguise the outline of a Second Empire mansion. Thus today we have a clash of styles that is probably more interesting, visually speaking, that a new apartment house in pure Mission style would have been.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 14, 2024
Allegheny Towers

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Tasso Katselas designed this mixed-use building, an apartment tower on top of a parking garage. It opened in 1966. For a while it was known by its address as 625 Stanwix Tower. Now it has been refurbished and given a spiffy new coat of black, which makes a big difference in its appearance. Compare the picture old Pa Pitt took from across the Allegheny nine years ago:

Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

Back then, Father Pitt was a bit harsh in his criticism: “There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation,” he wrote. But the new coat of black emphasizes the vertical lines and gives the building exactly the rhythm it was missing—which turns out to be a jazzy syncopation.

November 7, 2024
Weber Apartments, Dormont

Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film.

The striking patterned brickwork of an apartment building in Dormont captured in glorious monochrome.

We also have color pictures of this building and its neighbors.

October 28, 2024