Father Pitt

Tag: Cornelius (T. E.)

  • T. Ed. Cornelius House, Coraopolis

    T. Ed. Cornelius house, Coraopolis

    T. Ed. (for Thomas Edward) Cornelius was a successful second-string architect who was born in Coraopolis and lived there all his life. He had more of an eye for current trends than many of his kind: we have seen his “modern” Craftsman-style rowhouses in Brighton Heights (and duplicated in Shadyside, Bloomfield, and elsewhere around the city), his Craftsman-Gothic Beechview Christian Church, and his splendidly Art Deco Coraopolis VFW Post. This was Mr. Cornelius’ own house, where he was was living at the end of his life; he died in 1950, probably at an advanced age. We may guess that he designed the house for himself.

    611 Ferree Street
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The front door is a version of the rayed arch that was popular in domestic architecture in the late 1920s and into the 1930s.

    The house is on Ferree Street, named for one of the founding families of Coraopolis. T. Ed.’s wife was Lily Ferree Cornelius. Good connections never hurt an architect.

  • VFW Post, Coraopolis

    VFW

    Addendum: Thanks to a kind correspondent, we were directed to this article on Coraopolis history, where the architect of the VFW post is identified as T. Ed. Cornelius—an old friend of ours who always kept up with the latest styles and executed them well. The article as originally written follows.

    Father Pitt does not know the history of this building, but it is certainly a fine outcropping of Art Deco, and very well preserved in nearly its original state.

    VFW Keith Holmes Post No. 402

    The building stands at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Mulberry Street in Coraopolis.

    Above the entrance
    Veterans of Foreign Wars
    Keith Holmes Post No. 402
    Mulberry Street side

    The Mulberry Street side has its own entrance, and this part of the building may date from a different time—but not very different, since it is also in an uncompromising Art Deco style.

    V. F. W.

    A cornerstone on the Mulberry Street side dates at least this part of the building to 1941.

    Cornerstone
    Brickwork

    The architect (or the bricklayer) was someone who understood the effects of shadows, creating geometric patterns in light and dark by arranging bricks at different angles.

    Brickwork
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

  • The Kleber Row Newly Built, Brighton Heights

    Kleber Row in 1916

    Back in October we featured a row of houses designed by T. E. Cornelius on Davis Avenue in Brighton Heights. Thanks to an alert correspondent, here is that same row from the Pittsburgh Daily Post of March 5, 1916, with a caption describing the decidedly modern effect of the style:

    The illustration shows one row of a building operation comprising four rows on Davis avenue, Northside, erected for Henry Kleber by T. Ed. Cornelius, architect. The low raking roofs and heavy square columns give a “Craftsman” effect, and the interior is carried out in a similar style. This method of building three or six houses under one roof shows a handsome return on the money invested.

    Thirteen of these houses were built on the Kleber property. The houses still stand today, and in very good shape.

    The Kleber row today

    The architect and his clients obviously considered this design a success: T. E. Cornelius duplicated it at other sites in the city. It is a backhanded compliment to Mr. Cornelius that some architectural historians have misattributed a group of them in Shadyside to the noted progressive architect Frederick Scheibler. We might pay another compliment to Mr. Cornelius by noting that, everywhere these houses appear, they are in better shape than most of Frederick Scheibler’s rowhouses of similar size and era. These houses were built cheap, but they were built to last.

  • Beechview Christian Church

    Beechview Christian Church

    The building now belongs to Mercy Intellectual Disabilities Services, which has altered it to suit a radically different purpose. But the outlines of the church are still clear. The architect was T. Ed. Cornelius,1 about whom Father Pitt knows nothing except that he seems to have had a fairly successful career designing middle-class houses and modest churches—this one was budgeted at $25,000 in 1923, which was not a great deal to spend on building a church.

    This is another case where old Pa Pitt went looking for one of his pictures and discovered that he had never published it. The picture was taken in August of 2022, but only recently did Father Pitt discover the name of the architect.

    1. Source: The American Contractor, June 9, 1923: “Church: $25,000. 1 sty. & bas. 60×80. Shiras av. & Broadway. Archt. T. Ed. Cornelius, Magee bldg. Owner The Beechview Christian Church, Shiras av. & Broadway. Brk. Drawing plans.” ↩︎

  • Kleber Row, Brighton Heights

    This is only part of the row: there are thirteen of these houses in all. But if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, except for the one with the paste-on false shutters. The row was built in 1915 or shortly afterward as rental properties for Henry Kleber, Jr.; the architect was T. E. Cornelius,1 who shows up frequently in trade magazines of the time as a designer of middle-class houses. Cornelius’ Arts-and-Crafts sympathies are very much in evidence here: one almost feels as though the roof of the row ought to be thatched.

    By an odd coincidence, there is another line of rowhouses diagonally across Davis Avenue from these, and once again there are thirteen in the row.

    1. Our source for this information is the Construction Record. “Architect T. E. Cornelius, House building, awarded to George E. McKee, 6 Alger Street, the contract for building 13 two-story brick veneered and frame residences on Davis avenue, Northside, for Henry Kleber, Jr., 6020 Crafton street. Cost $25,000.” Kleber is marked as owner on a 1923 map. ↩︎