An attractively modernistic little apartment building—Father Pitt would guess it dates from about 1940—in good shape, with not too many alterations. Small details like decorative brickwork elevate it from mundane to elegant. And note the corner windows, the badge of mid-century modernity.
Father Pitt is not sure whether these three buildings were originally built as apartments or as single houses, but he is almost positive they were built as rental properties. Old maps tell a clear story: at some point a little before 1910, T. Herriott, who owned a house to the right of these buildings (where the Mark Twain Apartments are now), bought his neighbor’s large lot, demolished the frame house on it, and had these three buildings put up, which he continued to own at least through 1923. They obviously had porches, since the scars where the porch roofs were removed are covered with vertical clapboards.
The Flemish-bond brickwork is arranged with the headers in a different color, so that it looks surprisingly like Wikipedia’s color-coded diagram of Flemish bond:
This quiet enclave of small apartment buildings is part of the same “city set on a hill” development as the Morrowfield, and the buildings were probably also designed by J. E. Dwyer. They’re fairly ordinary Pittsburgh buildings of the early 1920s, Mission style with a bit of Romanesque thrown in. They look their best in black and white.
Built in 1903, this apartment building on East End Avenue was one of the early works of our future prophetic modernist Frederick Scheibler, while he was still in his classical phase. It is listed as No. 16, “Apartment building for Robinson and Bruckman,” in the Catalogue of the Works of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr., in The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr., by Martin Aurand (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994).
In the boom years after the Second World War, new housing couldn’t be built fast enough to satisfy the demand. Architects were busy, and modernism was the rage. The Mark Twain and the Stephen Foster brought clean modern lines to Neville Street and doubtless filled up as soon as they were opened to eager renters.
These two identical fantasy-Tudor apartment buildings at the corner of Morrowfield and Shady Avenues were built in 1929. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but they are very similar to apartment buildings built at the same time in Mount Lebanon and associated with Charles Geisler. Since Geisler worked on other buildings in Squirrel Hill, he is a likely candidate.
We have the technology to take those utility cables out of the picture, but in this case not the patience.
Designers of apartment buildings often put a lot of effort into the entrances, because the entrance is what sells the idea of the building. You are, after all, trying to make prospective tenants think this is where they want to live. You will walk through these doors, a good entrance says, and you will feel like a duke walking into his palace. In one short stretch of Bayard Street this morning, we collected several artistic entrances, beginning with the Adrian above, at which no duke would turn up his nose.
The Aberdeen is almost as splendid, an effect slightly diminished by installing stock doors at the entrance and balcony.
There are two King Edward Apartments (plus an annex around the corner); this is the older of the two.
The later King Edward is covered with terra cotta, and its bronze doors are themselves works of art.
Bayard Manor has the kind of late-Gothic entrance that would make you feel you had done your best if you were expecting a visit from Queen Elizabeth I.
The D’Arlington is an interesting combination of classical and Prairie Style, with both baroque and abstractly geometric ornaments coexisting comfortably at the entrance.
Finally, a later building that does not quite succeed in competing with its neighbors, but still provides a respectable-looking entry.
The Morrowfield is that big building that looms ahead as you approach the Squirrel Hill Tunnel on the Parkway from downtown Pittsburgh. It was built in 1924 as part of a huge development promoted by developer Thomas Watkins as “a city set on a hill,” and most of the buildings—including this one—were designed by the architect J. E. Dwyer, originally from Ellicott City, who built himself a house right next to the site and spent years supervising construction projects.
In this map from “A City That Is Set on a Hill,” Building Age, December, 1923, p. 36, the big rectangle marked “148 FAMILY APARTMENT” would become the Morrowfield.
The same article printed the architect’s elevation of the new apartment building, spread across two pages. We have taken some pains to restore it to legibility.
The building went up at a breakneck pace, with crews doing everything all at once. It was finished in less than a year. Below, “Steel work in the early stages showing the brick filler walls being laid before the concrete work was begun, to rush the job along.”
By the time the October, 1924, issue of Building Age came out (from which the pictures of the construction above were taken), the whole project was complete, and this photograph of the building from a distance was taken in time to make it into the magazine.
The entrance is liberally decorated with polychrome terra cotta.
The building of this project was watched nationally, because it was unusual to place such a large building on such a difficult lot. The architect’s elevation shows the slope of Murray Avenue along the front; here we can see that Morrowfield Avenue, on the right-hand side (in terms of the elevation), slopes upward even more dramatically. Then the street behind, Alderson Street, slopes upward again, so that the ground-floor entrances on Alderson Street are three floors up from the main entrance on Murray Avenue.
From that same article in Building Age:
The Morrowfield Apartments presents an interesting study in the effective utilization of exceptional grades. The front elevation faces a western street that is 30 feet lower than the street level in the rear, and a grade running north and south affects the building lengthwise as well as in depth.
The consequence is that the apartment is partly seven and partly eight stories high in front, and only five stories in the rear. What is really the fourth story when seen from the south elevation, is the first when seen from the rear, and the occupants of the fourth story front are therefore enabled to reach their apartments without the use of stairs or elevator by simply coming in the other street.
When our local historians speak of the early adopters of modernism among Pittsburgh’s architects, they usually mention Titus de Bobula, Frederick Scheibler, and Kiehnel & Elliott. Old Pa Pitt would propose to add Charles Bier to that short list. His work is not as imaginative as the best work of Scheibler, but that is about the worst that can be said for him. In the early twentieth century, Bier gave us a large number of buildings influenced by German trends in Art Nouveau, and he developed a distinctive style of his own—one that put an Art Nouveau spin on Jacobean forms. This apartment building is a good sample of his work. It was built in 1910 with six luxurious units.1
The entrance especially looks like something from a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. (We know those German and Austrian art magazines circulated among our architects in Pittsburgh; one of them actually took notice of Frederick Scheibler.) The oversized classical brackets are a whimsical touch.
These lanterns seem to be modern replacements, since ghosts of gaslights are visible behind them.
Update: Our correspondent David Schwing sends this photograph of the Herford from the Press article, showing the building when it was new.
There’s something pleasingly simple about this little apartment building just off the Potomac Avenue business district in Dormont. There are almost no decorative details, but the simple pilasters that frame the front give the building enough texture to carry itself with dignity. The stone lintels over the windows on the side of the building are a clue to its history: the front is probably a later addition, replacing open balconies with extra rooms. But the matching white brick makes the change hard to detect without some concentration.
The entrance (we are able to peer into the shadows by combining three different exposures in one picture) surprises us with classical woodwork and ornamental leaded glass—another clue that this building is older than we would have thought from a glance at the front.
