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.
This building went up between 1910 and 1923, and it seems to have been owned by the same Joseph Kinder who earlier put up the Kinder Building next to it facing Western Avenue. That is as much as old Pa Pitt knows, but his attention was attracted by the unusual brick patterns that ornament the front of the building.
Kiehnel & Elliott, one of the few Pittsburgh firms to pick up German-style Art Nouveau and run with it, designed this firehouse, which was built in 1908. The decorations are full of the elegant Jugendstil whimsy that was Richard Kiehnel’s specialty.
Titus de Bobula designed this school, built in 1904 for St. Michael’s, a Slovak parish. Although it has been altered here and there, enough remains to show us a very unusual mind at work.
For example, who else would have given us the ragtime rhythm of these tall and narrow stairwell windows (later bricked in)?
These abstract pilaster capitals are echoed on the porch columns of the convent next door, also De Bobula’s work.
This building has also been altered (the roof is newer, and the third-floor dormer appeared only about a decade ago), but we can see that its details were calculated to match the school.
Of all Titus de Bobula’s remaining works, this is the building that most astonishes architectural historians—the one architects study in their history classes—and we are pleased to say that it has had a good bit of money spent to stabilize and adapt it to its life as the National Carpatho-Rusyn Cultural and Educational Center. For a long time it was the cathedral of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy, until a new cathedral was built in a more suburban section of Munhall.
“Architect: de Bobula. Contractor: Bodine and Co. MCMIII.”
Titus de Bobula himself designed this plaque, as we can tell because the lettering is in his own very distinctive hand—the same style of lettering he used to sign his drawings. It was not common for architects to put their names on their buildings, but Titus de Bobula was not a common architect.
The rectory has been decaying, and we hope there will be enough money to carry the rehabilitation of the church into the rectory. They were built as a set, and Bobula’s rendering of the pair shows that the rectory was originally designed for a slightly higher budget. The places where it was cheapened are precisely the parts that are decaying now.
From the Czechoslovak Review, January, 1920 (but it is clearly De Bobula’s original rendering); found at Wikimedia Commons.
Some of the wooden porch columns have been lost; the ones that remain are getting crumbly.
It seems to old Pa Pitt that Charles W. Bier was a true original among our architects. He was not our greatest artist, but he developed a distinct style that was altogether his own. We may enroll him in our little club of early modernists, but he came at modernism in his own unique way. He combined regional Victorian variants of Gothic ornament with his own angular interpretation of the Art Nouveau that was wafting over from Germany and Austria. This church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1914, is one of his most characteristic works—and you could buy it right now, in good shape, with a fresh Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation plaque on the front.
Whenever you see a very broad and shallow arch with strong vertical lines above it, you should suspect Charles Bier.
If old Pa Pitt had to pick one apartment building to preserve in Pittsburgh, it would be a hard choice. But this one, built in 1905, is probably the first one that would come to mind. It was the one that earned Frederick Scheibler a short-lived international reputation, and it is perhaps our best example of the kind of Viennese Art Nouveau that some of our architects drooled over in the European magazines that made their way over here.
The name “Old Heidelberg” tells us something about the charm of this style. It’s the predecessor and source of what Father Pitt likes to call the “fairy-tale style” of the 1920s and 1930s: it tries to create an impression of a delightful time long past, but it does it with modern materials, sometimes shockingly modern, and with a design vocabulary that adroitly mixes the historical with the up-to-date and even futuristic.
The Old Heidelberg got quite a bit of attention from the architectural press, and the photograph above even made it into the Viennese annual Der Architekt for 1908, thus bringing the chain of architectural influences around in a circle, since Scheibler is known to have taken many of his ideas from Viennese publications.
Note how the building is constantly varied, even where you might expect it to be symmetrical. The balconies on the right are handled differently from the balconies on the left.
In 1963, the Historic American Buildings Survey took pictures of the Old Heidelberg, including a couple of interior shots—regrettably fogged, but still recognizable. Above, a dining room; below, a fireplace. We can see that the odd but effective combination of nostalgia and modernism prevailed in the interior as much as on the outside.
Little decorative whimsies all over add to the fairy-tale atmosphere and the sense that some kind of adventure lurks around every corner.
Cottage wings were added after the main building was put up; they match well enough that one might not guess that they were later additions, but the style is simpler and even more modern-looking.
Built in 1913, this house is a minor landmark of early modernism in Pittsburgh. Kiehnel & Elliott were the architects, and Richard Kiehnel had a thoroughly German architectural education. He applied the latest Jugendstil ideas of decoration, with a little Prairie Style thrown in, to the forms that were popular in Pittsburgh—like the standard three-storey Renaissance palace that is the basis of this house. The combination was a winner: clients got something that looked bracingly up to date, but didn’t make their neighbors hate them.
Father Pitt was looking at Wikipedia’s list of flatiron buildings in the United States and thinking that he could multiply the number by ten or so just from buildings in Pittsburgh and the surrounding suburbs. So he has begun a collection of these flatiron buildings, meaning buildings that are triangular like a clothes iron. Here is one that he found especially attractive. The shape is dictated by the acute angle between California Avenue and Woodland Avenue, and of course it has the usual Pittsburgh problem of irregularity in three dimensions to deal with. The form of the building is typical of early-twentieth-century commercial architecture, but the Art Nouveau patterns picked out in light Kittanning brick set this building apart from others like it.
The Chamber of Commerce Building seems to be neglected in Pittsburgh lore; nobody mentions it, and in fact the Skyscraper Page Pittsburgh skyscraper diagram skips right over it, ignoring it completely, though the diagram includes a number of considerably smaller and shorter buildings. Even old Pa Pitt has never featured this building before, mostly because it is difficult to get a picture of the whole building. So here is an illustration of the building when it was new; it has changed very little. It is easier to pick out details with a versatile lens, so here are a few of the interesting decorations. The architects were Edward B. Lee, who moved his office into the building when it was finished, and James P. Piper.
