An exceptionally splendid instance of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Georgian architecture from the days when the Colonial Revival was beginning to gather steam.
Overbrook was one of the last boroughs to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh. In 1929, when it was still independent, it built this fine all-in-one municipal building from a design by architect Louis Stevens, who is best remembered for houses for the rich and the upper middle class but also designed most of the public buildings for the borough of Overbrook. As far as old Pa Pitt knows, the building still belongs to the city of Pittsburgh, which has used it for various purposes over the years. It has been sensitively renovated and seems to have a secure future.
In seventeen and a half years of articles, this is the first time old Pa Pitt has published one about Overbrook. It just goes to show how much more there is to do. Even another seventeen and a half years will not come near to finishing the job, so Father Pitt will just have to keep working.
Colonial revival had passed from a fashion to a mania by the 1930s, with the restoration of Williamsburg capturing the American imagination with visions of an elegant Georgian past. Small federal buildings, especially post offices, almost always adopted the Georgian style—as we see in this modest post office with its neat Georgian entrance, complete with fanlight. The post office has moved to larger quarters, but the building is kept in original shape by its current occupants.
Coraopolis is notable for the variety of styles in its houses. Many have been altered over the years, but the back streets are still very pleasant. A few weeks ago, old Pa Pitt took a long walk through Coraopolis on a slightly drizzly day.
This seems to be the parsonage for the Methodist church next door.
The siding has swallowed the original details in this house, but it is neatly kept, and the Georgian form of it still carries a load of dignity.
This is a sad thing to happen to any house, especially a fine Dutch colonial on a pleasant street like this. We hope insurance will cover putting the house back together; we place it here in the middle of the album so that it will be documented if it has to be demolished, but there are still plenty of cheerful pictures to follow.
A pair of brick-and-stucco houses that stand out for their unusual choice of material by Coraopolis standards.
The Colonial Revival comes to Coraopolis in an exceptionally tasteful small house.
This center-hall house is remarkable, but not more remarkable than the trees in the front yard.
Originally the Wallace Memorial Presbyterian Church. In 2013, Dormont Presbyterian Church closed, and its congregation merged with this one; the two congregations together took the appropriate name Unity.
The current church building was put up in 1952 in the fashionable New England Colonial style; it’s a good example of that type.
The smaller Gothic church replaced by the 1952 church is still standing next to it, now in use as a music school.
“Altholl” was built on Stanton Avenue for U. S. Steel executive James Scott in 1900. Stanton Avenue, which today is marked as the border between Highland Park and East Liberty on city planning maps, was already lined with grand Queen Anne mansions; but the Colonial Revival was coming into fashion, and Scott’s house must have looked bracingly modern. It has the adaptable form of the typical large Pittsburgh center-hall house of the turn of the twentieth century, which can swing from Georgian to Renaissance to Prairie Style depending on the details. We’ll call this one “eclectic Georgian.” The house is listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
