Father Pitt

Tag: Apartment Buildings

  • River Vue Apartments

    The former State Office Building was designed by the firm of Altenhof and Bown (also responsible for the 1964 Federal Building on Grant Street; otherwise they seem to have specialized in schools). There was some grumbling when the state sold the building to private developers to be turned into luxury apartments, since space had to be found for the state employees, and some analyses suggested that the state would spend far more on leasing space than it would have spent on renovating the building. But it is certainly a first-rate location for apartments.

  • Apartments and Storefronts, Dormont

    This interesting residential-commercial structure on Potomac Avenue seems to combine two styles. The apartment building is a kind of very late Italianate, but the way the projecting storefronts form a sort of courtyard seems very much in the Mission style, as do the sloped roofs, which old Pa Pitt suspects were originally tile rather than asphalt shingles.

  • Decorative Brickwork in Dormont

    Dormont, a little borough on the southern border of Pittsburgh, is a pleasant place, and surprisingly densely populated. It’s number 62 on the list of United States cities by population density—more densely populated, for example, than Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, or Miami. That’s all the more remarkable because Dormont has no tall buildings to speak of. It’s mostly made up of row after row of densely packed single-family homes. But there are also a fair number of small apartment buildings like these, and many of them make up what they lack in architectural distinctiveness with brickwork in decorative patterns. These two buildings face each other across Voelkel Avenue.


    Map

  • Webster Hall

    Webster Hall was designed by Henry Hornbostel, Pittsburgh’s favorite architect in the early twentieth century. It was built as a luxury hotel [Update: in fact it was originally bachelor apartments, but that venture soon failed, and it was converted to a hotel] in 1926, and we can see Hornbostel moving from his flamboyant classical style (as exemplified in the City-County Building) to a sort of restrained Art Deco.

  • King Edward Apartments, Oakland

    This is not the largest but one of the most splendid apartment buildings in the North Oakland apartment district. It is a curious trapezoidal shape, crammed into a lot that is not quite rectangular and using up every inch of it.

    There are some stitching errors in this very large composite photograph, and old Pa Pitt is too lazy to fix them.