Father Pitt

Tag: Fairy-Tale Style

The Master of the Jumbled Bricks

Father Pitt has not yet identified the architect of these four apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon, but the style is so distinctive that we can confidently attribute them to the same hand. Adopting the practice of art scholars who name unidentified artists after the most distinctive features of their style, we call this architect the Master of the Jumbled Bricks. Perhaps some reader knows the architect’s real name.

The buildings all share patches of bricks and brick pieces laid in a jumble, as you see above. They also all use irregular (sometimes multicolored) roof slates and ornamental half-timbering, and even the bricks laid in regular courses are given as irregular a texture as possible. They are all in the exaggerated historicist manner that old Pa Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style.

We’ll begin with this building on Central Square. The bricks here have had some repair, but we can still see the effort and patient professional work that went into making the building look as though it was built by gnomes.

Not far away, on the other side of uptown Mount Lebanon, another of these apartment buildings stands on Florida Avenue:

Here the jumbling of the bricks is more patterned.

The polychrome irregular roof slates add to the fairy-tale atmosphere.

The next one, on Bower Hill Road, has fewer jumbles; they are placed up at the top among the irregular roof slates as a kind of billboard for the style.

Though the shades are more muted, these roof slates are also different colors.

Finally, the Stratford on Beverly Road.

So far, Father Pitt has found these four apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon designed by this unusually whimsical artist. There are probably others lurking in plain sight. Does anyone know the architect’s real name?

Father Pitt will add that he has some reason for suspecting that it might have been Theodore Eichholz, who was known to work in the fairy-tale style, and who designed an extraordinary whimsy in Highland Park, the Bendet house on Cordova Road, which uses jumbled bricks across the entire front. But this is only a vague suspicion. Anyone with better information is earnestly desired to inform us.

(Update: More and more evidence is pointing to Charles Geisler, resident of Beechview and architect of numerous apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon and Dormont, as well as Squirrel Hill, as the Master of the Jumbled Bricks. This is what the television reporters call a developing story, and old Pa Pitt will update this article with any more certain conclusions.)

March 23, 2024
St. Scholastica’s Convent, Aspinwall

Update: The architect was Edward Weber, one of our most distinguished ecclesiastical architects. You might say he wrote the book on Catholic Church Buildings, and this one is illustrated in it. We keep the original article below, with its incorrect speculations, because Father Pitt likes to emphasize his own fallibility.

Old Pa Pitt does not definitely know who designed this old convent (now a “ministry center”), but he would not be at all surprised to learn that it was Aspinwall’s own resident big-time architect Frederick Sauer, who could have walked to this site from his house in five minutes, and who was a known lover of yellow brick like this.

February 29, 2024
Some Houses in Seminole Hills, Mount Lebanon

Domestic architecture veered strongly toward the fantastic in the 1920s and 1930s, as we can see in some of the houses in Seminole Hills, one of several 1920s suburban plans inspired by the success of Mission Hills in Mt. Lebanon. The house above is a perfect example of what old Pa Pitt classifies as the fairy-tale style in architecture.

Once again, though, property owners hired their own architects, so a wonderful variety of styles is represented in the neighborhood.

February 13, 2024
Some Houses on Glenmore Avenue, Dormont

Several of these houses have fallen into the hands of house-flippers, which means that they have been made presentable with cheap materials that disguise the architects’ original intentions. But we can be grateful that they were rescued by capitalism from otherwise certain decay and demolition.

We begin with a design that, from certain angles, looks almost like a stretched bungalow. The part that is covered with vinyl siding was probably wood-shingled, although it went through a half-timber-and-stucco period that might also have been the original plan.

Here is a tidy little bungalow with no stretching at all, and it seems to retain almost all its original Arts-and-Crafts style.

Nothing says “flipped house” like vinyl siding and snap-on shutters for the windows. But the twin gables with swooping extended roofline show us the romantic fairy-tale cottage the architect meant this house to be. The top half, again, was probably wood-shingled; more recently it was covered with asbestos-cement shingles.

This unusual house brings more than a hint of the Prairie Style to the back streets of Dormont. Plastic cartoon shutters again, but those could be removed by the next enlightened owner, leaving an exterior almost completely original. The patterned brickwork is eye-catching without being garish.

The sunroom protruding from the front was probably an open porch when the house was built.

More pictures of Glenmore Avenue.

January 25, 2024
St. Mark’s School, McKees Rocks Bottoms

This is a Catholic school with more than the usual touch of whimsy. Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect, but whoever it was decided to make a school that would strike its pupils as something out of a fairy tale. [Update: We have found that the architects were the well-known Link, Weber & Bowers, “Link” being A. F. Link and “Weber” being Edward Weber.¹] It is sadly vacant and decaying right now, although at least the grounds are kept. The cornerstone tells us that the building was begun in 1928:

Since old Pa Pitt considers this school endangered, he has many pictures to show you, so the rest will be behind a “read more” link to avoid cluttering the front page for a week.
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November 17, 2023
Frick Park Gatehouse

This looks exactly like the gateway to a world of sylvan rest and rustic pleasure that it was meant to be. In passing we note that the gatehouse is actually a building, with a room on either side of the gate: we used to have staff to sit here and tend to park visitors’ needs.

The architect was a big deal for such a small structure: John Russell Pope. He had some famous commissions in Washington (that’s Big Worshington to residents of the South Hills): the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery of Art, Constitution Hall, and the National Archives, among other buildings. In Pittsburgh he is best known for the colossal Winter mausoleum at Allegheny Cemetery.

Map showing the location of this gatehouse.

September 11, 2023
Hampton Hall, Oakland

According to a city architectural inventory (PDF), Hampton Hall was built in 1928, and the architect was H. G. Hodgkins, who seems to have been based in Chicago, to judge by listings in Chicago trade magazines that show up in a Google Books search.

The interior includes quite a bit of Nemadji tile, and old Pa Pitt had never heard of Nemadji tile until he found this page on Hampton Hall from a site of Historic U. S. Tile Installations. The exterior is fairy-tale Tudor, designed to make apartment dwellers feel as though they were great lords of Queen Elizabeth’s time.

The entrance is flanked by bears holding shields, as bears are wont to do.

July 1, 2023
Apartment Building in Carrick

A fine example of the fairy-tale fantasy style that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The roof would probably have been green tile originally.

November 7, 2022