A row of four originally identical apartment buildings with Jacobean detailing.
This entrance seems to preserve its original details better than the others.
On the other hand, the colored tiles beside the door at this entrance are probably original, but have disappeared from the other three entrances.
The former College Club, designed in 1931 by Lamont Button, now in use as Whitfield Hall of Carnegie Mellon University. This is a phone picture from a few weeks ago, with the usual exaggerated colors that come from using the default Samsung camera app. In fact old Pa Pitt toned down the radioactive greens considerably, but the picture still looks a bit clownish. However, the colors of the trees and bushes were at least almost as bright as they appear, and you might as well have the picture, clown makeup and all.
We have more pictures of the College Club in slightly more subdued colors.
The Wilkinsburg borough building, which also houses the library, was designed by Theodore Eichholz in 1938, at the height of the mania for Colonial American architecture spurred by the restoration of Williamsburg. It opened on the first day of 1940.1 In these past two years it has been getting some restoration, including replacement of those tall columns, which are made of wood. The old ones had rotted; these new ones, carefully duplicating the originals, are supposedly treated to prevent rot—although if you only have to replace your wooden columns once every eighty-five years, you’re not doing too badly.
Designers of apartment buildings often put a lot of effort into the entrances, because the entrance is what sells the idea of the building. You are, after all, trying to make prospective tenants think this is where they want to live. You will walk through these doors, a good entrance says, and you will feel like a duke walking into his palace. In one short stretch of Bayard Street this morning, we collected several artistic entrances, beginning with the Adrian above, at which no duke would turn up his nose.
The Aberdeen is almost as splendid, an effect slightly diminished by installing stock doors at the entrance and balcony.
There are two King Edward Apartments (plus an annex around the corner); this is the older of the two.
The later King Edward is covered with terra cotta, and its bronze doors are themselves works of art.
Bayard Manor has the kind of late-Gothic entrance that would make you feel you had done your best if you were expecting a visit from Queen Elizabeth I.
The D’Arlington is an interesting combination of classical and Prairie Style, with both baroque and abstractly geometric ornaments coexisting comfortably at the entrance.
Finally, a later building that does not quite succeed in competing with its neighbors, but still provides a respectable-looking entry.
Fifth Avenue in Shadyside was the most famous of the millionaires’ rows in Pittsburgh. But there were some more modest houses as well—“modest” being a comparative term here. Some predated the arrival of the millionaires, and some were beyond the main stretch of mansions. Many have been replaced by postwar apartment buildings, but a number of these houses survive. A while ago, Father Pitt took an evening stroll on Fifth Avenue to have a look at some of them. Above, a wood-frame Queen Anne mansion with picturesque protrusions in all directions.
A center-hall house in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Georgian style.
Another center-hall house of the sort old Pa Pitt would call a center-hall foursquare. Walking around to the side reveals a fat turret that must add to the interest of the interior.
Another Georgian house, though the Georgian era was lamentably ignorant of buff Kittanning brick.
From the old days, before the millionaires, here is a wide I-house whose main part seems to have been built before 1872.
Georgian details applied to a pair of mirror-image apartment buildings on Elmer Street. The huge sunny bays might be described as exceptionally tall oriels, since they do not reach the ground, but instead terminate in surprisingly folksy carved wooden brackets.
Yesterday we looked at the Oakdale Public School, one of the earliest commissions for James E. Allison. Here, just a short distance to the west in the old village of Noblestown, is another Allison building1 from a little over a year later—a small frame church that, although it has been coated with artificial siding, still retains some of its distinctive character. The form is the irregular square popular in small Romanesque churches of Victorian times, but the details are Georgian, including the big window. The half-round protrusion in front indicates a Sunday-school room built on the popular Akron Plan. The congregation dissolved a few years ago, but the building is in use by a veterans’ organization called Heroes Supporting Heroes.
Philip Friedman was busy in the years after the Second World War. He designed an incredible number of apartment buildings, and he seems to have owed his success to two things (in addition, of course, to hard work and skill in managing projects): a knack for combining modern design with more traditional elements to attract a wide range of renters, and a willingness to compromise. When the July, 1950, issue of the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, published a layman’s criticism of Friedman’s work, Friedman replied that he was at the mercy of his clients, and sometimes they really did throw out his drawings and stick classical columns on a modernist building. However, he did what he could. “He contends…that while his buildings are admittedly far less esthetic achievements than economic realities, many other new multiple dwellings in this area reflect no concern for esthetics whatever.”
The Crafton Ingram Apartments, originally called the Crafton Ingram Arms, are typical of Friedman’s work. They were built in about 1950. The buildings are square brick modernist boxes. But they have quoins and pediments and other Georgian details to convince the rubes that this is a high-class establishment. Originally there were four identical groups—three in Crafton and one in Ingram. Two of them have disappeared: this is the one that still stands in Ingram.
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.
These pictures are more than a year old, but old Pa Pitt just ran across them and realized they had never been published. It’s an important building with its own entry in the National Register of Historic Places, so Father Pitt’s only excuse is that the piles of pictures sometimes accumulate too fast for him to process.
Edward B. Lee was the architect of this YMCA, built in 1922–1923 for the “colored” population of the Hill District. The idea of separating races of human beings gives old Pa Pitt hives, and he wishes it had been repudiated more thoroughly than it has been. But if it was separate, we must at least give it credit for being equal. Few neighborhoods could boast a YMCA better than this one.
