Father Pitt

Tag: Colonial Revival

Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

This is an old congregation, founded in 1837, and its adjoining cemetery has some stones dating from shortly after that. It has grown continuously; the building you see here was designed by Chauncey W. Hodgdon and built in 1915, and encrusted with additions fore and aft in later years. But the congregation (still Methodist, but advertising itself these days just as “Ingomar Church”) outgrew this church and built a much bigger one across the street; this is now the Ingomar Church Community Life Center.

The 1915 church was originally built very cheaply; its final cost of about $9,000 was roughly equivalent to the price of two middle-class houses at the time. A good history of the church was written in 1962 by Margaret L. Sweeney, and we take our information from that booklet (but we have corrected the spelling of the architect’s name).

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The new building across the street is in a grandiose New Classical style that recalls colonial New England churches and refracts them through a Postmodernist lens.

Ingomar is an unincorporated community that straddles two municipalities. Most of the church grounds and the cemetery are in the borough of Franklin Park, but the border with McCandless Township runs diagonally through this building.

October 27, 2024
Montours Church, Robinson Township

The current building is only a century old, but the congregation of Montours Church—also spelled Montour’s or Montour, depending on where you look—was founded in 1778, and the adjoining cemetery is full of Revolutionary War veterans.

A modern chapel built in 1978 is as tall as it is long, with a striking window at the far end.

A bell cast in Cincinnati in 1888 sits beside the church; it probably came from the older building that the 1924 church replaced.

“Van Duzen & Tift Cincinnati.”

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.

“Buckeye Bell Foundry 1888.”

October 20, 2024
Coraopolis YMCA

Now the Historic State Avenue Apartments, this old YMCA was designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1910. The style is a rich Georgian that makes the place look like a high-class resort hotel.

Even the alcoves for trash and utility equipment have a rich Colonial look.

Cameras: Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

July 11, 2024
633 Washington Road, Mount Lebanon

This is a building you walk right past without even noticing it. One of old Pa Pitt’s favorite things to do is to show people how interesting the things they walk right past can be. This building was the subject of an article in the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, so we know quite a bit about it, including that it looked like this when it was just finished in 1952:

The architect was Vincent Schoeneman, known as “Shooey,” who had a flourishing practice in the middle of the twentieth century. He was “given carte blanche” on the design, the article tells us, but put some effort into making the building fit with its prewar neighbors. Thus the curious combination of modernist and Colonial elements.

Some things have changed. The windows have been replaced, trading the twelve horizontal panes on each side for three vertical sheets of glass, which is not an improvement. The signboard that once displayed the address in letters that managed to be both modest and large has been covered with aluminum (with a dark stripe that would be perfect for the words “633 WASHINGTON ROAD” spelled out in white letters). The wooden planters are no longer there, but they have been replaced by stone benches or shelves that match the side walls. The Colonial doors have been replaced with more ordinary stock doors. Still, a good bit of the original detail remains.

Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

The whole text of the Charette article follows, reproduced here under the assumption that the copyright was not renewed.
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June 25, 2024
Transition House, Mount Lebanon

What, you may ask, is a “transition house”? It is a house designed to look traditional but use the most modern construction methods available in 1936. The idea was that the public could be induced to accept modern construction if it came without the modernist offenses against traditional aesthetics. Architect Brandon Smith—best remembered for some extravagant mansions in Fox Chapel—gave it all the decorative flourishes a 1930s suburbanite might expect from a “Colonial,” but under the stone and brick were super-modern materials developed at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research.

Our information and the architect’s drawing above come from an article about the house in the Pittsburgh Press, published when the house was under construction in 1936. The whole article will interest a few architectural historians, so we have transcribed it below.
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May 24, 2024
Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club

Some of the very few small houses left in downtown Pittsburgh were taken over in 1930 by the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club, which hired big-deal architect Edward B. Lee to transform them into an elegant clubhouse. The club survives, having absorbed two of Pittsburgh’s most prestigious other clubs—the Pittsburgh Club and the Allegheny Club—to become the Allegheny HYP Club. We note also that the club survived the construction of the Alcoa Building, which has a notch cut out in the back to accommodate its small but powerful neighbor.

March 13, 2024
Some Houses on Bigelow Boulevard, Schenley Farms

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.
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March 2, 2024
Colonial Place

Colonial Place is one of those tiny enclaves all built at once in which Shadyside abounds. This one was built in 1898, and it is unique in that the entrance is flanked by two grand mansions.

George S. Orth was the architect of almost all the houses in Colonial Place. (See if you can guess which house old Pa Pitt thinks was not part of the original plan.) Mr. Orth had a prosperous career designing mansions for the wealthy, as well as some large institutions like the School for Blind Children. But he seems to have been forgotten faster than most Pittsburgh architects. He died in 1918; ten years later, when the architect George Schwan died at 55, his obituary in the Charette had to remind readers who Orth was: “He [Schwan] was trained in the office of George S. Orth, old time architect of Pittsburgh…” That is all the more remarkable because the Charette was the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, of all groups the one that would be most likely to remember George S. Orth.

At any rate, Colonial Place is still a remarkably pleasant little street. The landscaping was done by E. H. Bachman, and the sycamores he planted still shade the street in summer and make a striking avenue in the winter with their stark white branches and trunks.

This mansion is currently the residence of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Pittsburgh.

This one is currently for sale, and you can tour the interior on Google Street View (push the “Browse Street View images” standing-figure button to reveal little blue dots all over the house).

January 21, 2024
Carron Street Baptist Church, Shadyside

This beautiful and tasteful Colonial Revival church by the Beezer Brothers was featured in the December 15, 1900, issue of the American Architect and Building News. You search Google Maps for it in vain today, and you may be thinking what a shame it is that it disappeared.

But it didn’t disappear. It’s still there.

It looks a little more working-class now, but it’s recognizably the same building. Is there a tasteful and wealthy congregation looking for a church? This one is ripe for restoration.

November 14, 2023
Chapel, Chatham University

Old Pa Pitt happened to notice that there were very few pictures in Wikimedia Commons of Chatham University, one of the most beautiful college campuses in Pittsburgh or anywhere. That omission had to be rectified. There are now thirty-two more good pictures in the Chatham University category, and we’ll be seeing many of them in the coming days. This is the chapel, a fine Colonial-revival building from 1940.

On city planning maps, Chatham is in Squirrel Hill. The University calls this the Shadyside campus. We put it in both categories.

April 21, 2023