A matched set of apartment buildings, just behind St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose simple modernist forms are enlivened with just enough medievalistic detail to let the tenants imagine they live in a castle.
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Medieval Modernism in Oakland
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Franklin Apartments, Park Place
A small and attractive apartment building in the part of Park Place that belongs to Wilkinsburg. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but these curved metal balconies that look as though they are serving the tenants up on platters were a favorite detail of Wilkinsburg’s own Milligan & Miller.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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Modernistic Apartment Building on Walnut Street, Shadyside
Shadyside seems to have a larger concentration of modernistic mid-twentieth-century apartment buildings than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood. Without any other information, old Pa Pitt would guess this one dates from about 1940.
Glass block from Pittsburgh Corning became a badge of modernity. If that were not enough, the metal awning over the entrance should do it.
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Thames Manor, Shadyside
This building immediately struck old Pa Pitt as a Geisler & Smithyman sort of building, and in this case his instinct was correct. It was built in 1929, and Geisler & Smithyman were indeed the architects. The Geisler of the firm was the venerable Charles R. Geisler, who lived in Beechview and scattered medium-sized apartment buildings all over the Pittsburgh area.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Webster Hall, Oakland
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Seen here from up the street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Craig Street.
We have more pictures of Webster Hall, including some of the decorative details.
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Ellsworth Towers, Shadyside
The postwar boom was a very busy time for architects of apartment buildings, and Philip Friedman was probably the busiest of them all. Friedman seems to have owed his success to his willingness to make compromises when the client asked for them. Here we have Friedman at his most purely modernistic, borrowing the very practical cruciform plan from Le Corbusier—a plan that was getting a lot of publicity from its use in the Gateway Center development. But even here…
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. …the froufrou grapevine-pattern metalwork that holds up the porch roof, which seems quite out of character for the modern-to-the-max building, was probably the client’s idea.
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Two Apartment Buildings on Voelkel Avenue, Dormont
These apartment buildings are a riot of patterns in bricks. Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about them other than what we see in the pictures, but he would not be surprised if they were designed by Charles R. Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed many other small and medium-sized apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, and who was fond of using patterned bricks for decoration.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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Apartment Building by Frederick Scheibler, Park Place
Before he fell under the spell of the European modernists, Frederick Scheibler had already developed his own distinct version of the classical style. Even if he had never progressed beyond the early style we see in this building from 1903, we would still think he was one of our more interesting minor architects.
The two-storey porch with a balcony dangling between the colossal columns is unusual—but not unprecedented. The Ruskin Villa apartment building in Wilkinsburg uses exactly the same idea, and in many other ways is similar to this building. In construction listings, L. A. Raisig was named as the architect of that building, which went up just a few months before Raisig took on young Frederick Scheibler as a partner. Father Pitt’s probably unprovable hypothesis is that Scheibler was already working for Raisig, and Raisig assigned the Ruskin Villa to him. This building in Park Place, then, would be a case of Scheibler adapting and refining ideas he had already worked out three years earlier.
Sony Alpha 3000.
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The Arden, Park Place
An early building by Frederick Scheibler, built in 1904, when Scheibler had not yet fully embraced modernism, but was already well on his way. Even in his earliest buildings, Scheibler already had his own distinct quirks in the classical style he had adopted. He liked his classical details big, like the arches here.
And even in this early building, we already see Scheibler absorbing some of the Art Nouveau ideas that were wafting over from Austria and Germany. This entrance is like nothing else in Pittsburgh.
The building is a bit bedraggled now, but it does look as though what is necessary to keep it intact has been done.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.
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Zimmerman Flats, Regent Square
Wilkinsburg’s own A. (for Adelbert) Dudgeon & Son, architects and builders, designed this striking apartment building in the Wilkinsburg quarter of Regent Square. Part of the front has been filled in, the fourth-floor balconies have been removed, and a Richard Nixon nose has been added, but on the whole the building is in very good shape, as we can see from this newspaper picture of the building when it was new in 1907.
Gazette Times, March 3, 1907. Thanks to David Schwing for finding this picture. Henrietta Street is now Whitney Avenue in Wilkinsburg, though the same street is still Henrietta once it crosses into Pittsburgh. Later maps show the building as the Ward Apartments, so Mr. Zimmerman must have sold it.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.
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