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.
A simple and dignified modernistic apartment building with tasteful Art Deco ornamentation. It is now an assisted-living facility.
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.)
Here we have two apartment buildings on more or less the same plan, but differing in their details.
The Shirley has two immediately striking features. First, the broad round arch at the entrance:
Second, the two-storey window (interrupted by inscription) in the stairwell, which also terminates with an arch.
Its neighbor (originally named Harmon: see below) uses contrasts in color to create a striking appearance.
The entrance is more classical, and instead of one tall window, the stairwell has two arched windows filled with colorful art glass.
Addendum: A 1934 plat map shows that the building on the left was originally called “Harmon.”
The Rose Court apartments were built in about 1928 or 1929, and they have hardly changed at all externally. They are a complex of seven buildings in the Central Square area of Mount Lebanon, built in a subdued Georgian style around pleasant garden courts, so that one side of each building faces a garden.
We have seen this Tudor palace before, but there is no reason we should not see it again, with some different details this time.
The entrance lobby. The interior is filled with richly colored tiles, some with decorative figures like this griffin.
Many of the apartment buildings in the East End sold a kind of architectural fantasy to prospective residents. The Georgian went the obvious step further and named itself after its own architectural style. It adapts Georgian elements with some success to the configuration of a large city apartment house, arranged around a pleasant garden court. The needs of the automobile, however, mean that the dominant impression as we read the name of the building in front is of a blank metal door. Father Pitt decided to crop out the garage door for the picture of the court below.
Father Pitt was so much taken with this apartment building when he glimpsed it from Penn Avenue in Garfield that he walked a quarter of a block or so out of his way to get pictures of it. The inset balconies are delightful, and the irregular side uses space efficiently while still flooding the rooms inside with light from multiple angles. But old Pa Pitt’s favorite thing was the oversized arch with orbiting leaded glass at the entrance.
