Father Pitt

Tag: Art Nouveau

Harding School, Carnegie

In 1922, President Harding was popular—just about as popular as any president since Washington had ever been. He was a little less popular a few years later, after he had died and members of his circle who had not shot themselves began serving prison terms. But the name seems not to have been enough of an embarrassment to change the inscription on the school. It retains that inscription in its new life as a retirement home more than a century later.

The first school on this site was the old Chartiers Public School (we assume the date 1878 refers to the building of that school). In 1922, this much larger building went up around the old school—for it appears that the original school may still exist, invisible under a layer of 1922 construction.

The architect of the new school was Frank M. Crooks, or Frank McC. Crooks, or Frank McCrooks, or Frank McK. Crooks. Thanks to our correspondent David Schwing, we have these four variant spellings of his name in four listings, so we have no idea which spelling is correct. However, three of the variants produce the name “Frank M. Crooks” if we do not treat “Mc” as a separate letter for purposes of initials and alphabetizing, as many publications did a century ago. For now, therefore, we accept the name as “Frank M. Crooks.”

Olympus E-20N; Samsung A15 5G.

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August 1, 2025
Apartment Buildings by W. A. Thomas on Friendship Park, Bloomfield

This striking building, which dates from about 1906, was designed by W. A. (for William Arthur) Thomas, a prolific architect and developer who is almost forgotten today. It’s time for a Thomas revival, Father Pitt thinks, because wherever he went, Thomas left the city more beautiful and more interesting.

The most attention-getting part of this building is the tower of half-round balconies in the front, and here the design is amazingly eclectic. Corinthian capitals on the pilasters and abstract cubical capitals on the columns—and then, on the third floor, tapered Craftsman-style pillars. But we don’t see a disordered mess. It all fits together in one composition.

Now, it’s possible that the interesting mixture of styles was the product of later revisions. But we are inclined to attribute an experimental spirit to Mr. Thomas. At the other end of the block…

This building is so similar that we are certainly justified in attributing it to Thomas as well unless strong evidence to the contrary comes in. But it is not identical. Here the columns go all the way up, and they terminate in striking Art Nouveau interpretations of classical capitals.

Volutes and acanthus leaves are standard decorations for classical capitals, but the proportions and the arrangement are original.

Olympus E-20N.

A fourth floor of cheaper modern materials has been added, but the addition was deliberately arranged to be unobtrusive, or indeed almost invisible from the street. Most passers-by will never even notice it.

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July 30, 2025
Terrace by Janssen & Abbott on McKee Place, Oakland

This striking design was by Janssen & Abbott, and it shows Benno Janssen developing that economy of line old Pa Pitt associates with his best work, in which there are exactly the right number of details to create the effect he wants and no more. The row was built in about 1913.¹ The resemblance to another row on King Avenue in Highland Park is so strong that old Pa Pitt attributes that row to Janssen & Abbott as well.

The terrace on King Avenue, Highland Park. In some secondary sources, this one is misattributed to Frederick Scheibler, but Scheibler’s biographer Martin Aurand found no evidence linking him to this terrace.

These houses are not quite as well kept as the ones in Highland Park. They have been turned into duplexes and seem to have fallen under separate ownership, resulting in—among other alterations—the tiniest aluminum awnings old Pa Pitt has ever seen up there on the attic dormers of two of the houses.

Nevertheless, the design still overwhelms the miscellaneous alterations and makes this one of the most interesting terraces in Oakland.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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June 27, 2025
Old St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral, Munhall

Back in 2014, old Pa Pitt took these pictures of the old St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Munhall. In the intervening years Father Pitt has learned much more about making adjustments to photographs to produce a finished picture that looks like the scene he photographed, so he presents these pictures again, “remastered” (as the recording artists would say) for higher fidelity.

The church was built in 1903 for a Greek Catholic (or Byzantine Catholic, as we would say today) congregation. When Pittsburgh became the seat of a Ruthenian diocese, this became the cathedral.

The mad genius Titus de Bobula, who was only 25 years old when this church was built, was the architect, and this building still causes architectural historians to gush like schoolgirls. It includes some of De Bobula’s trademarks, like the improbably tall and narrow arches in the towers and side windows and the almost cartoonishly weighty stone over the ground-level arches. It’s made up of styles and materials that no normal architect would put together in one building, and it all works. Enlarge the pictures and note the stonework corner crosses in the towers and all along the side, which we suspect were in the mind of John H. Phillips when he designed Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, which also makes use of De Bobulesque tall and narrow arches.

The rectory was designed by De Bobula at the same time.

This illustration of the church and rectory was published in January of 1920 in The Czechoslovak Review, but it appears from the style to be De Bobula’s own rendering of the buildings, including the people in 1903-vintage (definitely not 1920) costumes.

Kodak EasyShare Z1485; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

The Byzantine Catholic Cathedral moved to a modern building in 1993, still in Munhall, and this building now belongs to the Carpatho-Rusyn Society. According to the Web site, the organization is currently doing “extensive renovations,” which we hope will keep the church and rectory standing for years to come.

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June 22, 2025
House by Max Nirdlinger, Perry Hilltop
Maximilian Nirdlinger, who rests near the top of Father Pitt’s list of architects whose names are most fun to say, designed this striking house, which is unique in a row that otherwise consists mostly of Pittsburgh Foursquares. Nirdlinger was one of the giants of the first half of the twentieth century in Pittsburgh. He was a pupil of the Philadelphia titan Frank Furness, but left the master to come to Pittsburgh in 1899. By the early 1900s, he had his own practice.¹ He quickly caught the eye of the fashionable set: four of the original houses in Schenley Farms, for example, were designed by Nirdlinger.

Nirdlinger worked in many different styles: he could give you a Renaissance palace or a Tudor mansion with equal flair. For this Art Nouveau cottage, designed in 1916 for C. R. Caldwell, he seems to have taken a lot of hints from those German art magazines that circulated among our architects before the First World War.

Olympus E-20N.
1. Much of our information on Nirdlinger comes from “Maximilian Nirdlinger:
  Architect, Interrupted,” by Angelique Bamberger, in Western Pennsylvania History, Winter 2023-24. ↩︎
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May 12, 2025
Virginia Avenue on Mount Washington

As the storm clouds rolled in, old Pa Pitt was taking a walk in Mount Washington on a couple of blocks of Virginia Avenue. The neighborhood is an interesting phenomenon: it has always been comfortable but never rich (except for Grandview Avenue), so most of the houses and buildings have been kept up, and most of the renovations show the taste of ordinary working-class Pittsburghers rather than professional architects or designers.

We begin with one of the oldest businesses in the neighborhood: the Wm. Slater & Sons funeral home, which fills an odd-shaped lot that gives the building five sides or more, depending on how you count. Slaters have been on this corner since at least 1890. It is very hard to tell the age of the building, because it is really a complex of buildings that grew and evolved over decades, and each part of it has been maintained and altered to fit current needs and tastes. For example, on a 1917 plat map, the back end of the building is marked “Livery,” indicating that W. Slater had a stable there.

This building diagonally opposite from the Slaters has an obtuse angle to deal with. Its Second Empire features are still in good shape above the ground floor, and the storefront has been kept in its old-fashioned configuration of inset entrance between angled display windows.

Here is a house built in the 1880s, also in the Second Empire style, with mansard roof giving it a full third floor. The house has been kept up with various alterations that obscure its original details (the porch, for example, is probably a later addition), but it is still tidy and prosperous-looking.

It is hard to tell what this building was originally, but Father Pitt would guess it was more or less what it is now: a storefront with living quarters upstairs. The front has been altered so much, however, that it would take a more educated guesser than Father Pitt to make an accurate diagnosis.

This apartment building has also been much altered; the windows in front, for example, were probably inset balconies

The interesting Art Nouveau detailing of the brickwork reminds us of the work of Charles W. Bier, a prolific architect whose early-twentieth-century work earns him a place among our early modernists, though he turned more conservative after the Great War.

Kodak EasyShare Z981.

At this point in our walk, the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain was upon the earth, and we retreated to our ark.

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May 3, 2025
St. Richard’s School and Church, Hill District

St. Richard’s parish was founded in 1894 and immediately put up a temporary frame church. Two years later, a rectory—obviously meant to be permanent—was designed by J. A. Jacobs in a restrained version of the Queen Anne style.

In 1907, the parish started building a school, which would also have temporary facilities on the ground floor for the church until a new church building could be built. It was partly financed by “euchre and dance” nights.

Father Pitt has not yet succeeded in finding the name of the architect, but he has found a lot of newspaper announcements of euchre and dance nights.

The permanent church was not yet built in 1915 when this convent, designed by Albert F. Link, was put up. Although the second-floor windows have been filled in with much smaller windows, and the art glass has been replaced with glass block, the proportions of the building are still very pleasing.

We note a pair of stained-glass windows in one of the filled-in spaces on the second floor. If Father Pitt had to guess, he would guess that they came from one of the central windows that are now filled in with glass block.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

It turns out that the permanent church was never built. The dwindling congregation continued to meet for Mass on the ground floor of the school until the parish was suppressed in 1977. The school became St. Benedict the Moor School, and the ground floor was finally converted into the classrooms it had been designed for. Later the school moved to larger facilities at the former Watt Public School, but the parish kept up the old building as an events center.

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April 27, 2025
Wendover Street Apartments, Squirrel Hill

The distinctive Flemish gables of these apartments catch our attention as we come down Beacon Street. They were probably designed by Perry & Thomas, a Chicago firm responsible for a number of apartment buildings in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. Although some ill-advised changes have been made, for the most part the unusual details—Flemish Renaissance filtered through an Art Nouveau lens—have been preserved.

Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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April 17, 2025
Endangered Buildings in Carrick

It is never pleasant, but old Pa Pitt feels as though he has a duty to document things that might be gone soon. Sometimes miracles happen, and we can always hope, but without a miracle we can only turn to the photographs to remember what has vanished.

“Berg Place,” a group of three apartment buildings along Brownsville Road in Carrick, probably cannot be saved. It’s a pity, because the buildings, in a pleasant Arts-and-Crafts style flavored with German Art Nouveau, have a commanding position along the street, and their absence will be felt. They were abandoned a few years ago, probably declared unsafe, and since then they have rotted quickly.

Some of the simple but effective Art Nouveau decorations in brick and stone.

These two buildings across the street from Berg Place, damaged by a fire, may possibly still be saved. At present one of them is condemned, but that is not a death sentence, and it looks as though prompt action was taken to secure the one on the corner after the fire. They are typical of the Mission-style commercial buildings that were popular in Carrick and other South Hills neighborhoods, and they ought to be preserved if at all possible. Carrick is not a prosperous neighborhood, but much of the commercial district is still lively, and with the increase in city property values the repairs might be a good investment.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS

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March 29, 2025
The Linwood, North Point Breeze

The Linwood, designed in 1906, is characteristic of Frederick Scheibler in his early-modern phase. You can imagine it being published with approval in one of those German architectural magazines that our local architects occasionally got their hands on. It contained six luxurious apartments, with maids’ quarters, for well-to-do city-dwellers. Although the windows have been replaced and the third-floor balconies have been filled in for sun rooms, the strong lines of the building still make pretty much the same impression they did when it was new. It stands out without offending: it looks like something special, which would be helpful in peddling apartments to the smart set.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10 (all but this picture); Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

These pictures were taken just this afternoon. After a while the rain started to pour. But would that deter old Pa Pitt from getting one more picture? Certainly not! He will dry out eventually.

This is Father Pitt’s first article on anything in North Point Breeze—another neighborhood he has neglected too long. Several other North Point Breeze articles will follow soon.

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March 28, 2025