These splendid marquees with their Art Nouveau lettering in glass welcome us to the Princess Ann, an apartment building in the Colonial Heights plan in Mount Lebanon. Many of the external details of the building are beautifully preserved and maintained, including the art glass on the marquees and in the stairwells.
This small apartment building on Overlook Drive in Mount Lebanon is the Maywood.
If you’ve spent any time walking around in the Great State of Mount Lebanon (as Peter Leo used to call it), you might recognize it. But you might not have seen it here. Perhaps you saw it over there:
This is the Meadowbrook on Meadowcroft Avenue.
Or maybe you saw…
The Wil-O-Be on Academy Avenue. Or…
This one on McCully Street was called El Ronson, which is old Pa Pitt’s new favorite name for an apartment building.
Or perhaps you saw…
It seems that this one on Beverly Road had only its address for a name. The lintels are slightly different, and the roof is flat.
And then there’s…
The Harmon, on the left. The Shirley, next to it, is the same basic design, but its variation of the detail strikes us as almost daring after all the others we’ve seen.
We have not exhausted the incarnations of this apartment building, but this should be enough to start your collection. Now you can go out into the streets of Mount Lebanon and keep an eye open, and eventually you may be able to collect the complete set.
A simple and dignified modernistic apartment building with tasteful Art Deco ornamentation. It is now an assisted-living facility.
