Hampton Hall is a grand Tudor apartment palace in Oakland designed by the Chicago architect H. G. Hodgkins.
A while ago one of the residents mentioned to old Pa Pitt that the long canopy that usually leads from the courtyard entrance to the street had come down for work, which—our correspondent pointed out—would make some of the previously hidden details accessible to a camera. Here, from about two and a half years ago, is how the canopy usually looks:
And here is the courtyard without the canopy:
Father Pitt ended up spending an hour or more taking pictures all over the building, and since he has so many pictures, he will split them into multiple articles to avoid wearying his visitors. Today we see the courtyard and the main entrance.
A well-kept apartment building that retains its original art glass in the stairwell, though the apartment windows have been filled in with smaller substitutes.
If old Pa Pitt had to pick one apartment building to preserve in Pittsburgh, it would be a hard choice. But this one, built in 1905, is probably the first one that would come to mind. It was the one that earned Frederick Scheibler a short-lived international reputation, and it is perhaps our best example of the kind of Viennese Art Nouveau that some of our architects drooled over in the European magazines that made their way over here.
The name “Old Heidelberg” tells us something about the charm of this style. It’s the predecessor and source of what Father Pitt likes to call the “fairy-tale style” of the 1920s and 1930s: it tries to create an impression of a delightful time long past, but it does it with modern materials, sometimes shockingly modern, and with a design vocabulary that adroitly mixes the historical with the up-to-date and even futuristic.
The Old Heidelberg got quite a bit of attention from the architectural press, and the photograph above even made it into the Viennese annual Der Architekt for 1908, thus bringing the chain of architectural influences around in a circle, since Scheibler is known to have taken many of his ideas from Viennese publications.
Note how the building is constantly varied, even where you might expect it to be symmetrical. The balconies on the right are handled differently from the balconies on the left.
In 1963, the Historic American Buildings Survey took pictures of the Old Heidelberg, including a couple of interior shots—regrettably fogged, but still recognizable. Above, a dining room; below, a fireplace. We can see that the odd but effective combination of nostalgia and modernism prevailed in the interior as much as on the outside.
Little decorative whimsies all over add to the fairy-tale atmosphere and the sense that some kind of adventure lurks around every corner.
Cottage wings were added after the main building was put up; they match well enough that one might not guess that they were later additions, but the style is simpler and even more modern-looking.
Robert J. Worsing was both the developer and the architect of this good-looking six-unit building, put up as condominium apartments in 1977. Among the amenities was “a 36-inch wide log-burning fireplace” in each unit, which explains the prominent chimneys with their modernistic chimney pots. A Press article showed the architect’s model, which includes the fabric awnings that—surprisingly—are still maintained over the front windows.1
A modernist building typical of the postwar apartment boom, including the tall stairwell light made of glass blocks—a Pittsburgh product much employed in the middle twentieth century. To old Pa Pitt’s ears, “Castletone” sounds like the name of a third-string record company, but the apartments are in a very convenient location, just down the street from the Mount Lebanon subway station on the Red Line.
A little apartment building—with four apartments, judging by the number of buzzers—in what old Pa Pitt calls the fairy-tale style, the mark of which is exaggeratedly picturesque features that look like illustrations from a children’s book.
The entrance is so similar to the entrance to the Sholten Arms in Carrick that we have to suspect the same hand drew both. Father Pitt’s guess is that the decorative gable was originally carried all the way to its logical peak, but was truncated when the overhang was rebuilt.
Somehow the line for the Mount Lebanon Historic District was drawn just to the left side of this building, leaving it unhistorical, though taking in a much more pedestrian postwar apartment building across the street. Fortunately, historic district or no historic district, most of the details have been preserved, although the original windows would have added a layer of artistry that their simpler modern replacements lack.
The art glass in the stairwell has been preserved.
The front door is a work of art in itself. Enlarge the picture and admire the door pull.
A massive new apartment tower for Duquesne University students, and a big improvement in the Uptown cityscape (it replaced a parking lot). The architects were Indovina Associates, who designed the building in a subdued version of the currently popular patchwork-quilt style, with materials that harmonize well with the other buildings along the Uptown corridor.
An attractive and well-maintained building that would have been even more attractive when that overhang had green or red tiles. The style seems to hover somewhere between Renaissance and Arts and Crafts.
After the originally tiled overhang and its showy wooden brackets, the most eye-catching feature is the balconies with their bulging iron railings.
