Frederick Sauer was the architect of this ornate commercial palace, built in 1908. It is covered in white enameled terra-cotta ornaments that give it a sense of opulence above its budget.
We also have some earlier pictures of the Werner Building and some remarks on its history.
This building has been slowly crumbling for many years now, and it has finally reached a stage where reasonable people agree nothing can be done to save it. According to neighborhood gossip, it was estimated that five million dollars would be needed just to stabilize the structure, and no one has five million to spend on a big church in Manchester.
It is part of the curious paradox of Manchester that this church stands on Liverpool Street right next to perhaps the finest and best-restored block of Victorian rowhouses in Pittsburgh. “A building like this anchors the community,” one neighbor told old Pa Pitt—“even in this condition.”
St. Joseph’s was built in 1897 for a German parish. The architect, as we might guess from the picturesque style and the buff brick, was Frederick Sauer.1
When the parish closed, the building was sold to a nondenominational congregation, but the same neighborhood gossip tells us that the congregation struggled even to pay utility bills. After it folded, the building stood vacant, and suffered the usual piecemeal destruction of a large vacant building.
A few days ago, Father Pitt passed by on Liverpool Street and saw the big red sticker on the door. It was pouring down rain at the time, but he went back the next morning to document the church before it disappears, which is why we have more than fifty pictures to show you.
Many more pictures…
This historically Black congregation has met in this building for more than 120 years. Some of the stained glass is being restored, so old Pa Pitt will have to return for more pictures when the work is done. The architect was Frederick Sauer,1 who specified his favorite buff Kittanning brick for the job. These streets in the central part of the North Side are tiny, and Sauer’s challenge was to cram as much church as he could into a minuscule lot. He employed the usual Pittsburgh expedient of putting the sanctuary upstairs, with Sunday-school rooms and offices on the ground floor. It seems, by the way, that old Pa Pitt succeeded in finding the architect where other local historians failed (or didn’t try), but the citation is no surprise. This buff Kittanning brick was almost Sauer’s signature, and the building looks like what would happen if you squished St. Mary of the Mount into an impossibly tiny lot.
The front of green terra cotta is unique in Pittsburgh. Frederick C. Sauer designed this building, and when it was done he moved his office into it. It is the only one of Sauer’s buildings, as far as old Pa Pitt knows, that bore his name on the building itself, though at some point some workman, doubtless thinking he was doing a splendid job of renovating the building, did his best to obliterate the letters:
Addendum: As we might have guessed from looking at the front, the building rose in two stages. Three floors were added in 1909.1
Built in 1901 for the W. W. McBride Paper Company, this near-skyscraper was designed by Frederick Sauer.1 A few alterations have been made, but the building still stands much as Sauer designed it.
A casual look at the building gives the impression that it has a stone base, but the effect comes from using white face brick for the lower two floors—with inset ridges to imitate cut stone—and Sauer’s favorite buff brick for the rest.
Mitchell’s on the ground floor claims to have been established in 1906, so it has been going since shortly after the building opened.
By 1923 this was known as the Bowman Building, but W. W. McBride ghost signs are still visible on the northern side.
Frederick Sauer was probably the architect of these rather German-looking houses. They were built as rental properties on land that belonged to developer John Dimling, and in every case where we have found an architect listed for a Dimling project, it is always Frederick Sauer.
It is a little hard to tell how the right end of the row looked originally. Alterations that look as though they were made in the 1970s have obscured the original design, which—with its curved corner—would have been something interesting.
That sounds like the title for a very complicated farce, but these are actually the names of six apartment buildings in Oakland, all of which share a common style. First, on Oakland Avenue, we have Harry, George, Matilda, and Laura, which look like four buildings but are really two identical buildings, each divided in two parts. The romantic battlemented fronts give tenants the chance to imagine themselves as medieval lords and ladies fresh out of a Walter Scott novel. These fantasies were effective in selling apartments, and probably still are.
Around the corner on Dawson Street are two other buildings that share many of the same details. They had the same owner—John Dimling (note the sign for the private alley Dimling Way in the picture above)—and we can guess that they were probably drawn by the same pencil. These are called Hilda and Herbert.
Here the architect has responded to the challenge of a lot that is not rectangular with a pair of asymmetrical designs that resemble but do not repeat Harry, George, Matilda, and Laura.
John Dimling was also the owner of the rainbow terrace on Dawson Street, and it is a good guess that the same architect was responsible for that as well. That architect was almost certainly Frederick Sauer, who is best remembered for his churches (like St. Stanislaus Kostka and St. Stephen Proto-Martyr) and his backyard whimsies, but who was very busy with all kinds of work. Father Pitt has not found these particular buildings in construction listings yet; but John Dimling was responsible for quite a bit of development in this part of Oakland, and in looking through the trade magazines for Mr. Dimling’s name, we find that, whenever an architect is mentioned, it is always and without exception F. C. Sauer during the period when these buildings went up (around the turn of the twentieth century). We therefore attribute them to Sauer until someone proves otherwise.
Perhaps the best way to describe the architect Frederick Sauer is to say that he was a high-functioning mad genius. He produced some very respectable church designs—St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, St. Stanislaus Kostka, and St. Mary of the Mount, to name three. Meanwhile, he went home every evening and started pulling rocks out of his back woods and piling them up into whimsical buildings with his own hands.
When he designed a private residence, Sauer sometimes pushed the limits of current styles. Here is a big stony house built from his design in 1893. It hits some of the fashionable Romanesque notes, but that immense crowstepped Flemish gable makes a big impression on the neighbors. (The high-pitched roof and big gables also give the house a roomy third floor.)
A year and a half ago, old Pa Pitt published pictures of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, but he was unable to get a picture of the front, because the leaves were on the trees, and the front looked like this:
On a gloomy afternoon recently, however, he happened to be in Hazelwood, and the trees were only beginning to leaf, so it was possible to make out the building through the bare branches.
The church was built in 1902; it is one of the most important works of Frederick Sauer, and it is hanging by a thread. The building is not in regular use, but not precisely abandoned. We will describe it as Endangered on our six-point scale of Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Demolished.
To cut through the clutter of branches and bring out the building, Father Pitt tried several exposures with two different cameras and different kinds of processing afterward. He did not come up with any outstanding pictures, but at least the outlines of the design are clear now.
Designed by Frederick Sauer, this school was called the Latimer School after Allegheny was conquered by Pittsburgh. It was built in 1898.
In the 1980s it was converted to apartments under the name “The School House.” As far as old Pa Pitt knows, this was the first major conversion of a disused school to apartments in the city, and it showed that the idea was viable.
The school was converted to apartments in the age of Postmodernism, and the designer of this canopy cleverly made it a kind of abstracted projection of the original entrance. Father Pitt caught the fabric part of the canopy on a bad hair day.
The North Avenue side.
Map.
