Tag: Carpenter & Crocker

  • Row of Houses by Carpenter & Crocker, Homewood

    This picture was taken a year and a half ago, but it seems it got lost in the press of events, and Father Pitt never published it here. He went looking for it because he had just found the architects: research by the grandson of William Carpenter indicates that these houses on Kelly Street at Collier Street were designed by Carpenter & Crocker in about 1901. They were originally part of a larger group of 24 dwellings, but two other rows—one on Collier Street, the cross street, and one on the alley behind, Fleury Way—have vanished. The building on the corner was probably part of the original row; at any rate, it was in place by 1910, when a fire-insurance map shows a three-storey building here at the end of a row of two-storey buildings. It looks to old Pa Pitt like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense: that is, a bar with rooms above to make it eligible for a “hotel” liquor license.

    Two years later, Carpenter & Crocker would design St. James Episcopal Church, now the Church of the Holy Cross, just across Collier Street from these houses. Was the developer a member of the St. James congregation?

  • Parish House, Trinity Cathedral

    Buildings on Oliver Avenue behind Trinity Cathedral

    We are used to seeing Trinity Cathedral from the Sixth Avenue front. At the rear of the lot on Oliver Avenue is a complex of buildings that form a Perpendicular Gothic wall along the street. The Parish House in the middle was designed by Carpenter & Crocker; and since the parts all match in style, we may attribute the whole complex to the same architects with some confidence. The treatment of the broad late-English-Gothic arches is very similar to that on Carpenter & Crocker’s Church of the Holy Cross in Homewood.

    Entrance and central building
    Rear of Trinity Cathedral from the west
  • Church of the Holy Cross, Homewood

    Church of the Holy Cross

    In many neighborhoods this would be the most distinguished building, but of course Homewood has Holy Rosary Church. Nevertheless, this is an important building in its own right. It was built in 1904 as St. James Episcopal Church, but in 1953 it was bought by a Black Episcopalian congregation, which obviously showers love on this building. It was designed by Carpenter & Crocker, and the grandson of William James Carpenter gives us the story of the church on a site dedicated to his grandfather’s work. You can also read the story of the congregation from the church’s own site (the link goes to a page where you can download a PDF file).

    Church of the Holy Cross
    Tower
  • Willis McCook Mansion, Shadyside

    You can make good money as a lawyer if you make the right contacts. Willis McCook was lawyer to the robber barons, and he lived among them in this splendid Gothic mansion on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row. The architects were the local firm of Carpenter & Crocker. It is now a hotel called the “Mansions on Fifth,” along with the house around the corner that McCook built for his daughter and son-in-law.

  • St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Highland Park

    Completed in 1909, this typical Gothic church was designed by Philadelphia architects Carpenter & Crocker, who also designed Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Homewood and at least one of the Fifth Avenue mansions in Shadyside.

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS. The composite picture above is about 25 megapixels if you click on it.