Father Pitt

Tag: Art Nouveau

  • Art Nouveau Apartment Building in Allentown

    Apartment building on Walter Street

    You walk up Walter Street past the usual Hilltop cacophony of vernacular houses with aluminum and vinyl siding, and then suddenly you come upon this explosion of Art Nouveau. The building has lost its balconies (a long time ago, to judge by that tattered aluminum awning) and its cornice, but it retains its utter uniqueness, right down to the balcony doors to nowhere on the second and third floors, which appear to be original and designed specifically for this building rather than ordered from a catalogue.

    This strange and wonderful little building is obviously the work of a strange and wonderful architect. But which one? It was built after 1903 but before 1910, and we are sorely tempted to attribute it to Titus de Bobula, whose entire Pittsburgh career blossomed and faded in that period. The treatment of the decorations strongly reminds old Pa Pitt of the Everett Apartments in Shadyside—in fact the decorations are so similar that Father Pitt is nearly convinced they have to be by the same architect. He is not the only one to notice the similarity. A city architecture inventory (PDF) also points it out: “Its similarity to another apartment building in the East End (at Ellsworth Avenue and Copeland Street in Shadyside) further sets the design of 404 Walter apart from the local vernacular found throughout the rest of Allentown.”

    To see what both Father Pitt and the city’s architecture experts are talking about, consider these decorations:

    Abstract decoration
    More decoration

    Now compare this decoration from the Everett in Shadyside:

    Decoration from the Everett Apartments

    The similarity is certainly marked; many of the pieces are identical. Since the Everett is attributed to Titus de Bobula, we are justified in saying that he is a strong possibility for this one, too.

    Another De Bobulesque feature is the lack of a main entrance: instead there is a small door off to one side that appears to lead into a stairwell. This is also the case with his Glen Tenement House in Hazelwood and with the Everett. The narrow verticals with asymmetrically staggered windows remind us of St. Michael’s School in Braddock, another De Bobula design (Father Pitt promises to make a pilgrimage to Braddock soon and come back with pictures).

    Father Pitt will regard this as a De Bobula building until someone proves otherwise. But he would be delighted to have someone prove otherwise, because then he would be introduced to another eccentric but talented architect.

    Apartment building
    Oblique view

  • Emerson Apartments, Shadyside

    The Emerson

    Update: See the comment from David Schwing below identifying this as a 1906 design by Chicago architect Samuel N. Crowen. Father Pitt looked at some of Mr. Crowen’s other buildings, and the ones from this period certainly seem to bear a stylistic resemblance, although in his later works the architect turned more conservatively classical. Compare this apartment building on Google Street View, with its similar corner balconies, square windows, exaggerated cornice, top floor set off by a masonry stripe, and entrance surrounded by Art Nouveau curves. Imagine how much more that building might resemble this one if this one had not been painted.

    Father Pitt keeps the original article, with all its speculations, below, so that his readers can see how his mind works.

    Today this strange building that makes faces at you as you go by has no name; on Google Maps, it is called “Apartment Building.” But on a 1923 map it is marked as “Emerson,” belonging to a B. F. Newman. It first appears on the 1910 layer of the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, where property owners are not marked. And with that, old Pa Pitt has exhausted all the information he has been able to gather about this building. Searching for information is made more difficult by the fact that there is a later apartment building in Shadyside also called “The Emerson,” a Frankenstein construction with a Fifth Avenue mansion at its core encrusted with modern growths of differing ages and styles.

    At first sight this has the outlines of an ordinary early-modern apartment building, but when you look up at the balconies you find the building looking back at you.

    Balcony
    Balcony
    Grotesque face

    We know that this building was put up before 1910. Father Pitt knows of only a few architects working in Pittsburgh at the time who were batty enough to do something like this.

    Father Pitt’s first guess is Titus de Bobula, whose churches are strongly marked with Budapest Art Nouveau. He also did commercial and apartment buildings, and his career is obscure enough that a number of commissions have probably gone unrecognized. He is known to have done the Everett Apartments (1907) on Ellsworth Avenue at Copeland Street; it has similarly inset balconies flanked by decorated square pilasters, and it uses exactly the same terra-cotta cornice moldings as the ones on this building.

    Frederick Scheibler, our most famous early modernist, is known to have designed about 150 buildings around here, of which Father Pitt has fewer than forty in his Great Big List as of this writing. His style varied over the years of his career, but the whimsically grotesque faces do not seem like his sort of thing.

    Kiehnel and Elliott were also working here at that time. They were influenced by German modernism, and when they later moved to Miami they became famous for extravagantly decorated Art Deco designs. They are a possibility.

    We might also mention Edward Keen, about whom Father Pitt knows nothing (even his name: in some sources it is Kern) except that he designed the D’Arlington in Oakland, a building teetering on the border of classicism and modernism whose lines strongly remind us of this building.

    So there you have it: an enigma, and Father Pitt would certainly be grateful for any scraps of information about this building.

    Entrance

    The curving lines of this entrance also strongly suggest Titus de Bobula.

    Balcony
    Balcony from the side
    Side of the grotesque head
    From the west
    The Emerson

  • Decorations on the Central Turnverein

    Lintel

    Now the Gardner Steel Conference Center, the Central Turnverein was German Pittsburgh’s most elegant athletic club. The building is an extraordinary early-modern design by Kiehnel and Elliott, and they trimmed it with geometric decorations inspired by the latest Jugendstil architecture overseas.

    Central Turnverein
    Bracket
    Rectangle
    Window frames
    Another rectangle

  • Hampshire Hall, Shadyside

    Hampshire Hall

    Addendum: This was originally called Haddon Hall, and it was built as a hotel, or at least it was a hotel early in its history. We now have a picture of Haddon Hall in 1929, before the modernist growth on the front.

    This is a distinctive building, and old Pa Pitt searched almost fifteen minutes for the architect without success. He would be delighted if someone could tell him who designed this little outcropping of dignified Art Nouveau. Father Pitt might suspect Kiehnel and Elliott as the architects most likely to be working in this style in Pittsburgh, but that is nothing more than a wild speculation.

    Front

    The glass-block windows in the front stairwell were probably stained glass when the building opened, and we can hope that those windows are preserved in a private collection somewhere.

    The modernist addition on the front is not as delightful as its architect probably hoped it would be. It was probably put there in about 1961: a newspaper ad from December 22, 1961, promotes the Walt Harper Quintet’s appearance at the “newly remodeled Haddon Hall Lounge.” (In an earlier version of this article, Father Pitt wrote, “It appears to be a glass enclosure for what was once an elegant verandah.” That was wrong: old photos from before the remodeling show no verandah.)

    Medallion
    Window
    Flower ornament
    Hampshire Hall

  • Central Turnverein, Oakland

    Central Turnverein

    A Turnverein (German for “gymnastics association”) was a German athletic club, many of which were scattered through the city. This was doubtless the most luxurious of the lot. It is now the Gardner Steel Conference Center of the University of Pittsburgh.

    Art Nouveau is rare in Pittsburgh, but here is a building that crosses Jugendstil with Prairie Style to produce a distinctive classical modernism. (The picture above is big: enlarge it to appreciate the delightful abstract decorative details.) It was finished in 1912, when Jugendstil was perhaps past its peak in Germany but was still adventurously modern here. The architects were Kiehnel and Elliott, who were more experimental in spirit than most Pittsburgh architects of the time. Richard Kiehnel was born in Germany and had absorbed Jugendstil at the source. The firm is actually more famous for its buildings in Florida; Kiehnel designed a Miami mansion for the president of Pittsburgh Steel, and it apparently made such an impression down there that Kiehnel and Elliott moved to Miami in 1922.

    Gardner Steel Conference Center

  • First Hungarian Reformed Church, Hazelwood

    First Hungarian Reformed Church

    And then there’s Titus de Bobula.

    There are few real outliers among the architects who worked in Pittsburgh before the First World War; we had brilliant architects, but we can sort most of them into groups by the styles they worked in. Titus de Bobula’s work, however, is unique here. He brought us a breath of Budapest Art Nouveau, and for a few years he was the favorite architect for East European churches of all sorts.

    And then he was gone—back to Hungary, where his regular job seems to have been trying and failing to overthrow the government. Later he ended up back in the United States, but he never again had a great architectural career. Perhaps that was because he worked with Nikola Tesla, designing the structural parts of Tesla’s never-built (and possibly delusional) superweapons. It might have been a good job at the time, but no permanent structures ever came of it.

    So we should try as hard as we can to preserve what remains of de Bobula’s work. Fortunately this church, built in 1903, still belongs to its original congregation and is still active.

    The shape of the building is similar to the shape of your average Pittsburgh Gothic church, but the details are straight from fin-de-siècle Budapest—right down to Titus de Bobula’s trademark Art Nouveau lettering in the inscriptions.

    Inscription
    Entrance

    The wildly irregular stonework around the uniquely shaped windows may remind you a bit of Gaudi.

    Isten hozott

    “Welcome” in stained glass over the main entrance.

    Signature

    Titus de Bobula made a habit of signing his buildings. The rail of a later wheelchair ramp obstructs part of this inscription (the contractor was Bodine and Co.), but we can see enough to appreciate the Art Nouveau lettering.

    First Hungarian Reformed Church

  • Art Nouveau Apartment Building in Shadyside

    This would be a fairly ordinary building, in what we might perhaps call Renaissance style, except for its curious Art Nouveau ornamentation.

    Addendum: According to a city architectural survey, this building, the Everett Apartments, was a work of the extraordinary Hungarian Art Nouveau architect Titus de Bobula.

  • Art Nouveau Stained Glass on Carson Street

    The Art Nouveau style never made much headway in Pittsburgh, but there are a few examples of ornamentation in a style that deserves that name—especially stained glass, which lends itself to the kind of abstraction we associate with Art Nouveau. This window is in a storefront near the Birmingham Bridge.

  • 418 First Avenue

    Update: The massive survey of historic buildings adopted by the city in 1994 tentatively identifies this building as a work of Titus de Bobula. That would certainly explain its eccentric style: Pittsburgh never had another architect like him. It would also date the building between 1903 and 1910. If we read the map correctly, it first appears on the map layer dated 1903–1906 at the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, so this might have been one of de Bobula’s early commissions here. Our original remarks appear below.

    It has not been possible to find any information about the age or architect of this curious building in the limited time old Pa Pitt was willing to devote to the task. The researchers who compiled information for the Firstside Historic District also threw up their hands. It is a mostly utilitarian small warehouse, but with angular decorations that suggest a prickly version of Art Deco. Right now you can buy it if you like, and then you might find more clues to its origin among the debris of the decades.

  • Old Church in Spring Hill

    One of old Pa Pitt’s many regrets is that he did not buy this old church on Rhine Street in Spring Hill, merely to preserve its unique Art Nouveau façade. Behind the façade was a pedestrian frame building clinging to the side of the hill, but the façade itself was not quite like anything else in Pittsburgh. This picture was taken in 1999; the church was demolished some time after 2016, when the abandoned hulk still appears in Google Street View. The stained glass probably still exists somewhere; it was removed before the building was demolished.

    Map