Two doors up the street from St. Michael’s School is this colorful little building, of whose history old Pa Pitt knows nothing. Perhaps someone better informed can reveal it to us in the comments. Father Pitt thought it might have been part of St. Michael’s parish, but old maps do not seem to suggest that it was. Whatever it was, its colorful tile arches and terra-cotta ornaments are worth preserving, and we are happy to see it so well maintained.
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.
Pittsburgh’s own Harry H. Lefkowitz was the architect of this futuristic tower of furniture, which was built in 1941. The building is one of the chief landmarks of the moderne style in the Pittsburgh area, and by sheer luck it has not been too much damaged over its eighty-five years of existence. It is an astonishing thing to come across while walking or driving through the almost deserted business district of Braddock. Now, at last, it is appreciated: it has been restored, complete with its spectacular sign, as artist residences, and as much of the original modernistic appeal as possible has been kept intact.
Old Pa Pitt has been wandering in Braddock, and we’ll see many pictures in the next few weeks. Some of what we’ll see is sad, so we begin with good news to show that there are people who love Braddock and have hope for its future.
This is what we think of when we hear “Victorian house”: turrets and angles everywhere. The picturesque arrangement also creates interesting and versatile spaces inside.
Another of the seven closing churches in the inner eastern suburbs. The dominant feature of this one, built as St. Michael’s in 1929–1930, is the huge octagonal lantern.
Addendum: The architect was Carlton Strong, according to Van Trump & Ziegler’s Landmark Architecture of Allegheny County (1967), p. 163.
The interior of the church is much more auditorium-like than most Catholic churches of its era, probably because a square lot forced it to make that adaptation.
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.
For some reason, Park Place is one of those neighborhoods that have no official existence on city planning maps. It is counted as part of Point Breeze South, but there is a considerable gap between the rest of Point Breeze South and Park Place, which slops over into Wilkinsburg, thus becoming one of the rare neighborhoods that ignore city boundaries. In fact the border goes through a number of buildings and houses.
Ellsworth Dean was the architect of this Renaissance palace of education, which was built in 1903. It is now an “Environmental Charter School.” We assume that means children can have the unique experience of learning in an environment. (Actually, old Pa Pitt just looked up the school’s Web site, and now he is wishing there had been such things as Environmental Charter Schools when he was a tot back in pre-Revolutionary days.)
A magnificent building that takes full advantage of a magnificent site, right at the busy corner of Forbes and Braddock Avenues. It was dedicated in 1930; the architects were Ingham & Boyd, who abstracted the Gothic style into a cool and elegant modernism that does not look dated at all almost a century later.
When the cornerstone was laid on November 17, 1928, the Press described the planned facilities:
The new church will be of early English gothic style of architecture. The contract for the erection of the church has been awarded to Edward A. Wehr, noted builder of a number of famous churches in Pittsburgh and other cities. The seating capacity of the new edifice will be slightly in excess of 600. The exterior walls will be of Indiana limestone. The roof will be an “open timber” roof, with wood trusses exposed. In the vestibule, oak paneling will be used to the top of the doors, with plaster above and an oak beam ceiling. The floor of the vestibule will be tile. Paneled and carved woodwork will be used at the front of the auditorium, the pulpit, reading desk, choir gallery and organ screen being designed as a unit to create a focal point in the design at this location. Temporary windows will be of leaded glass of good quality, in the hope that from time to time these temporary windows may be replaced with memorial windows of stained glass, of high quality in design and workmanship.
That the assembly room on the ground floor may be used as a social room as well as for Sunday school purposes, a temporary kitchen has been arranged for, adjoining. At the opposite end of the assembly room, shower baths and locker rooms have been provided in accordance with the original intention of using this room for recreational purposes also.
—“Sunday Service to Mark Start on New Church,” Pittsburgh Press, November 17, 1928, p. 5.
This splendid edifice cost about $100,000 when it was built in about 1905. The architects were McCollum & Dowler,1 and that Dowler is the young Press C. Dowler, who would practice architecture for two-thirds of a century and run through every style of his long lifetime, from Romanesque through Art Deco to uncompromising modernism. The building still stands today on Braddock Avenue, and the front still looks about the same.
