On Florida Avenue, a street that runs behind the Uptown business district in Mount Lebanon, two apartment buildings in a toned-down version of Moderne streamlining face each other. The most striking feature of number 666 is the stairwell set into a tall groove with a two-floor window of glass blocks.
The decorative brickwork at the corners suggests quoins, but in a modernistic manner.
Across the street is a pair of identical buildings with less streamlining and no abstract quoins.
Both buildings would probably have had windows with more character when they were new.
Academy Avenue in Mount Lebanon has a mixture of single-family homes and small to medium-sized apartment buildings. We have seen some of the apartment buildings before; here are a few more.
We saw the building above once before; here it is in a different light at a different time of year. The architect was probably Charles Geisler, and buildings in variations of this same basic plan are all over Mount Lebanon and Dormont.
This is a tidy double duplex in very close to original condition. The little details make all the difference in its appearance: the tile roof overhangs, the proper windows for the era, and the little German-art-magazine ornaments in the brickwork.
Charles Geisler designed numerous apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon, Dormont, and Squirrel Hill, among other places. This one he also owned, at least when it first went up.
A picture of the building when it was new in 1929 (taken from a blurry microfilm copy of the Pittsburgh Press) shows us what has changed: the roof overhangs, some of which have been removed, were originally tile; the roof was flat (replaced now with a hipped roof, doubtless to solve persistent leaking problems); and the apartment windows matched the ones in the central stairwell.
The entrance and stairwell are the least-changed parts of the building, and we can see how Geisler used tastefully simple arrangements of brick and tile to create apparent ornamental richness.
Le Corbusier introduced the world to the idea of the cruciform apartment building. He regarded the form as so perfect, in fact, that he proposed demolishing Paris and replacing it with a sea of cross-shaped towers.
In Pittsburgh, cruciform buildings were a bit of a fad in the late 1940s and early 1950s, probably encouraged by the national attention lavished on Gateway Center. They do have certain advantages. A cross-shaped building can give every apartment cross-ventilation and a view of open spaces, while still putting quite a bit of building on a small lot.
Tennyson and Van Wart were among the architects who picked up on the idea. Alfred Tennyson was a Mount Lebanon architect who would continue with a very prosperous career in the second half of the twentieth century. John Van Wart, as half of the partnership of Van Wart & Wein, had been responsible for some big projects in New York in the 1920s and early 1930s; in the middle 1930s, he moved to Pittsburgh to work for Westinghouse, and then formed a promising partnership with Tennyson. His unexpected death in 1950, probably while this building was under construction, put an end to the partnership, and Tennyson went on alone.
The style is typical postwar modernism, but not pure modernism. A few little decorative details, like the subtle quoins, give the modernism a slight Georgian flavor.
The scalloped woodwork, if it is not a later addition, must have been one of those details added to persuade prospective tenants that this building was, after all, respectably Colonial enough not to embarrass them.
As with many Pittsburgh buildings, the question of how many floors this one has is a complicated one. The answer varies between three and six, depending on how you look at it.
We have seen the Berkshire before, but those pictures weren’t very good, so old Pa Pitt went back and got better ones. It’s a courtyard apartment building in the Mount Lebanon Historic District; as Father Pitt said the first time he visited, this building is in a simple but attractive Jacobean style, where a few effective details carry all the thematic weight.
Originally the Kent and the Howe, this pair of attached buildings was renamed for its most prominent decorative feature—the lion’s heads that preside over each entrance. The architects were the Chicago firm of Perry & Thomas, who were responsible for a number of apartment buildings in Shadyside and Oakland; they were especial favorites of the developer John McSorley.
A pair of identical apartment buildings, now known by their addresses (5758 Howe and 5754 Howe). They were built in 1908; the architect was C. J. Rieger. Though they have lost their cornices (which, to judge by the size of the scars, must have been elaborate), the rest of the details are well preserved, showing a Renaissance or Baroque style flavored with Art Nouveau.
If you walk along Bailey Avenue on Mount Washington (a pleasant walk, by the way), you may notice some similar-looking apartment buildings scattered along the south side of the street. The double duplex above is one of them; we see it head on below.
You might also notice a distinctive ornament at the peak of the roofline:
Old Pa Pitt noticed it and made a not-too-outrageous guess that it was the initial of the owner. That turns out to be correct. These buildings were all owned by P. W. Hamilton, as we see on a 1923 plat map:
Here are two of them a few doors apart—the one we saw above, and this one:
These buildings have recently had a lot of spiffing up, and they look like very attractive places to live.
With these two doors open, we can see how, as is usual with Pittsburgh duplexes, the doors to the upstairs units lead straight to a stairway.
There are three of these double duplexes, all the same design. Then, as we come to the eastern end of the street, opposite Grandview Park, we find the same design on a larger scale:
It’s a double double duplex.
The H ornament is not here; instead we get little lunettes, one of them blank and one with a wreath ornament. But the building was owned by P. W. Hamilton, and its outline on the plat map shows how it is made by smashing two of the double duplexes together.
Father Pitt has not yet identified the architect of these four apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon, but the style is so distinctive that we can confidently attribute them to the same hand. Adopting the practice of art scholars who name unidentified artists after the most distinctive features of their style, we call this architect the Master of the Jumbled Bricks. Perhaps some reader knows the architect’s real name.
The buildings all share patches of bricks and brick pieces laid in a jumble, as you see above. They also all use irregular (sometimes multicolored) roof slates and ornamental half-timbering, and even the bricks laid in regular courses are given as irregular a texture as possible. They are all in the exaggerated historicist manner that old Pa Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style.
We’ll begin with this building on Central Square. The bricks here have had some repair, but we can still see the effort and patient professional work that went into making the building look as though it was built by gnomes.
Not far away, on the other side of uptown Mount Lebanon, another of these apartment buildings stands on Florida Avenue:
Here the jumbling of the bricks is more patterned.
The polychrome irregular roof slates add to the fairy-tale atmosphere.
The next one, on Bower Hill Road, has fewer jumbles; they are placed up at the top among the irregular roof slates as a kind of billboard for the style.
Though the shades are more muted, these roof slates are also different colors.
Finally, the Stratford on Beverly Road.
So far, Father Pitt has found these four apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon designed by this unusually whimsical artist. There are probably others lurking in plain sight. Does anyone know the architect’s real name?
Father Pitt will add that he has some reason for suspecting that it might have been Theodore Eichholz, who was known to work in the fairy-tale style, and who designed an extraordinary whimsy in Highland Park, the Bendet house on Cordova Road, which uses jumbled bricks across the entire front. But this is only a vague suspicion. Anyone with better information is earnestly desired to inform us.
(Update: More and more evidence is pointing to Charles Geisler, resident of Beechview and architect of numerous apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon and Dormont, as well as Squirrel Hill, as the Master of the Jumbled Bricks. This is what the television reporters call a developing story, and old Pa Pitt will update this article with any more certain conclusions.)
