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.
Now Spencer United Methodist. Charles W. Bier was the architect of this church,1 which opened in 1925. It sits on a steeply sloping lot at the southern end of Carrick, so that—like many Pittsburgh churches—it has ground-level entrances on two ground levels.
An open belfry becomes a nuisance to maintain, and when the bells are silenced—as they have been in most of our churches—the belfry is often filled in.
The American Contractor, April 14, 1923: “Carrick, Pa.—Church:$100,000. 1 sty. 100×72. Church st. & Spencer av., Carrick. Archt. Chas. W. Bier, Pittsburgh Life bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner The Spencer M. E. Congr., Spv. Gilbert G. Gallagher, 117 Spencer av., Carrick. Solid brk. Drawing prelim. plans.” The church as built does not seem like a $100,000 church. But the dimensions and estimate went up: November 3, 1923: “Church: $140,000. 1 sty. & bas. 75×143. Church st. & Spencer av., Garrick [sic]. Archt. Chas. W. Bier, Pittsburgh Life bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner The Spencer M. E. Congr., Rev. Gilbert G. Gallagher, 117 Spencer av., Garrick. Revising plans.” The current church looks like Bier’s work; we can only guess that the ambitious plans were scaled back a bit before construction began. ↩︎
When our local historians speak of the early adopters of modernism among Pittsburgh’s architects, they usually mention Titus de Bobula, Frederick Scheibler, and Kiehnel & Elliott. Old Pa Pitt would propose to add Charles Bier to that short list. His work is not as imaginative as the best work of Scheibler, but that is about the worst that can be said for him. In the early twentieth century, Bier gave us a large number of buildings influenced by German trends in Art Nouveau, and he developed a distinctive style of his own—one that put an Art Nouveau spin on Jacobean forms. This apartment building is a good sample of his work. It was built in 1910 with six luxurious units.1
The entrance especially looks like something from a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. (We know those German and Austrian art magazines circulated among our architects in Pittsburgh; one of them actually took notice of Frederick Scheibler.) The oversized classical brackets are a whimsical touch.
These lanterns seem to be modern replacements, since ghosts of gaslights are visible behind them.
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.
As we mentioned before, we are attempting to photograph every house in the residential part of Schenley Farms. Here is a big album of houses on Bigelow Boulevard, which becomes a residential street as it winds through the neighborhood. Above, Ledge House, the strikingly different home of A. A. Hamerschlag, the first director of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was designed by Henry Hornbostel, who designed the Carnegie Tech campus and taught at Carnegie Tech. It has recently been cleaned of a century’s worth of industrial soot and restored to its original appearance.
Above and below, the D. Herbert Hostetter, Jr., house, architects Janssen and Abbott. Benno Janssen and his partner abstracted the salient details of the Tudor or “English half-timber” style and reduced it to the essentials, creating a richly Tudory design with no wasted lines.
Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.
We’ll be seeing quite a bit of Schenley Farms in the coming weeks, because old Pa Pitt has taken it upon himself to photograph every house in Schenley Farms. The neighborhood has perhaps the most concentrated collection of superb domestic architecture in a city known for its superb domestic architecture. Here we have an interesting composition by Charles W. Bier, an architect who paid more attention than most Pittsburghers to the breezes of modernism blowing from Germany and Austria on the one side and Chicago on the other. This house compares favorably with the Kiehnel & Elliott house we saw recently: it also fits well with its neighbors while adopting modern Art Nouveau details. This one, unfortunately, has lost its front porch, which would have been a showcase for some interesting woodwork. We get a hint of what it might have been from the porte cochere:
This duplex in Beechview is one of a pair right beside the Westfield stop on the Red Line. It looked very familiar. Where had we seen it before?
This duplex is on Ellsworth Avenue in Shadyside, part of a group of duplexes on St. James Place and the adjacent side of Ellsworth Avenue. It is not identical to the one in Beechview, but so many of their parts are identical that the Beechview and Shadyside duplexes were obviously drawn by the same pen.
Above, a perspective view of one of the pair in Beechview, which is marked “Woodside Dwellings” on a 1923 map. It stands on Westfield Street, which was briefly called Woodside Avenue; the other of the pair was called “Suburban Dwellings” after the cross street, Suburban Avenue. Except for the loss of the Tudor half-timbering in the front gable, this one is very well preserved. (Suburban Dwellings has lost more details.)
Below, a perspective view of one of the duplexes in Shadyside.
One of the details they share is a “No Outlet” sign. But we can see that the Shadyside duplexes are narrower and deeper than the Beechview ones. The same architect adapted as much of the same design as possible to the different dimensions of different lots.
Four more of these duplexes stand on St. James Place, a little one-block side street running back to the cliff overlooking the railroad and busway.
This one has kept its original tile roof.
A detail preserved by the one in Beechview is the Art Nouveau art glass with Jugendstil tulips.
Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect of these Tudor duplexes. But if he had to make a wild guess, he would guess Charles Bier. The wide arches with strong verticals above, and the filtering of Tudor detailing through a German-art-magazine Art Nouveau sensibility, strongly remind us of Bier’s other works. There are other known works of Bier both in Shadyside and in the South Hills.
Charles W. Bier was a fairly successful Pittsburgh architect, especially busy with medium-sized churches, who flirted with Art Nouveau in the days before the First World War, but retreated into a more traditional style in the 1920s (see, for example, his 1923 Mount Lebanon Methodist Episcopal Church). Here we find him at his most radically modern in a line of three identical double duplexes, built in about 1915 or 1916.1
These broad entrance arches with strong vertical lines show up on Mr. Bier’s churches of the period as well.
The geometrical brickwork ornaments remind us of the decorations in German art and architecture magazines of the period, and they may be where our architect got his ideas. (According to Martin Aurand, Frederick Scheibler took much inspiration from those German magazines, so they were available here.)
The building at the right end of the row seems to be stuck in the middle of a refurbishing project, with new windows installed and new wood framing inside. We hope the work can continue, because these three striking buildings really are unusual in Pittsburgh and ought to be preserved.
Source: The Construction Record, September 11, 1915: “Bids are in for the erection of three two-story brick veneered and hollow tile double duplex residences, on Murtland avenue and Idlewild street, for Mrs. W . J. Burkhard, Mrs. Josephine Friday and Mrs. Mary A. Saupp, Blackadore Avenue Extension. Cost $45,000. Plans by Architect Crarles [sic] Bier, Pittsburgh Life building.” ↩︎
One of three fine Gothic churches in a row, this one is actually in Dormont—but not by much. The Mount Lebanon border runs down Scott Road to the right of the building, then jogs behind the building to take in the St. Clair Cemetery.
Addendum: The church was built in 1923 or after; the architect was Charles W. Bier. Source: The American Contractor, October 13, 1923: “Church: Approx. $150,000. 2 sty. & bas. 100×100. W. Liberty av., Mt. Lebanon. Archt. C. Bier, Pittsburgh Life bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner Mt. Lebanon M. E. Congr., G. W. Beams, 1225 Peermont, Dormont, Pa. Stone. Gen. contr. let to H. Busse Co., Main & Wabash av., Pittsburgh, Pa. Plmg. to Reynold Gusse, 130 Wabash av., Pittsburgh. Rfg. to Crafton Rfg. & Furnace Co., 7 Crafton av., Crafton, Pa.”
