Father Pitt

Tag: Georgian Architecture

  • St. Richard’s School and Church, Hill District

    St. Richard’s School

    St. Richard’s parish was founded in 1894 and immediately put up a temporary frame church. Two years later, a rectory—obviously meant to be permanent—was designed by J. A. Jacobs in a restrained version of the Queen Anne style.

    Rectory

    In 1907, the parish started building a school, which would also have temporary facilities on the ground floor for the church until a new church building could be built. It was partly financed by “euchre and dance” nights.

    St. Richard’s school and church

    Father Pitt has not yet succeeded in finding the name of the architect, but he has found a lot of newspaper announcements of euchre and dance nights.

    Convent

    The permanent church was not yet built in 1915 when this convent, designed by Albert F. Link, was put up. Although the second-floor windows have been filled in with much smaller windows, and the art glass has been replaced with glass block, the proportions of the building are still very pleasing.

    Third-floor decorations
    Front of the convent

    We note a pair of stained-glass windows in one of the filled-in spaces on the second floor. If Father Pitt had to guess, he would guess that they came from one of the central windows that are now filled in with glass block.

    St. Benedict the Moor School
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    It turns out that the permanent church was never built. The dwindling congregation continued to meet for Mass on the ground floor of the school until the parish was suppressed in 1977. The school became St. Benedict the Moor School, and the ground floor was finally converted into the classrooms it had been designed for. Later the school moved to larger facilities at the former Watt Public School, but the parish kept up the old building as an events center.

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  • Laughlin Hall, Chatham University

    Laughlin Hall at Chatham University
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Built in 1931, Laughlin Hall was designed by E. P. Mellon, an architect of conservative but refined taste who prospered through his connection to the Mellon family. (E. P. stood for Edward Purcell, but he seems to have been known by his initials.) The Mellons were big patrons of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Chatham’s predecessor, and Uncle Andy himself had his house nearby.

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  • College Club, Oakland

    College Club

    Lamont Button, who made a specialty of high-class houses for the higher classes, designed this club for university women, which opened in about 1932. “It is planned to provide rooms on the second and third floors for college girls working in the city,” the Press reported. “The first floor will have a large social hall and tearoom. In the basement will be a main dining room and several smaller dining rooms. An auditorium seating 470 will be included in the plans.”

    College Club

    Today the building belongs to Pitt, but on the outside it has hardly changed from Button’s elegant design—a simplified, modernized Georgian that could hardly look out of place anywhere, and fits perfectly in the wildly diverse Craig Street streetscape.

    College Club
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • Old Post Office, Coraopolis

    Entrance to the old post office

    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.

    Post office
    Cornerstone, with Louis A. Simon as supervising architect
    Side of the building
    Old post office
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
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  • Altholl, Highland Park

    Altholl

    “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.

    Center Window
    Dormer
    Ionic capital
    The James Scott House
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • More of Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill from the front

    The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.

    Front door
    Perspective view of Robin Hill
    Right side of Robin Hill
    Perspective view of the garden side
    Garden face of the mansion
    Robin Hill mansion seen from the gazebo
    Back door of Robin Hill
    Window of Robin Hill
    Stairs up from the garden
    Left side of Robin Hill
    Garden face of Robin Hill
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.

  • Two Houses on Centennial Avenue, Sewickley

    106 Centennial Avenue

    Two houses on one of Sewickley’s toniest streets. First, a house with the simple dignity of the Greek Revival.

    106 Centennial Avenue
    106 Centennial Avenue
    114 Centennial Avenue

    This house has the form of what old Pa Pitt calls a center-hall foursquare, with details taken from colonial New England.

    114 Centennial Avenue

  • The Negley, Shadyside

    The Negley

    The Negley was probably built in about 1909; the architects were the firm of Janssen & Abbott. Some of the original details have vanished over the years, but Benno Janssen’s spare version of Georgian style still leaves an impression of dignity and elegance.

    The Negley
    Entrance
    Lunette
    Doorway frame

    An unusual choice: the doorway frames are cast iron.

    The Negley
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

  • Some Houses on Beaver Street, Sewickley

    36 Beaver Street

    Sewickley is known for its grand houses, and some of the grandest are along Beaver Street, the main street of the village.

    36 Beaver Street
    26 Beaver Street
    26 Beaver Street
    56 Beaver Street
    56 Beaver Street
    56 Beaver Street
    66 Beaver Street
    66 Beaver Street
    59 Beaver Street

    Addendum: This one is the Edward O’Neil house, designed by Rutan & Russell.1

    59 Beaver Street

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1281; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    1. It is pictured in the February, 1904, issue of The Builder, page 20. ↩︎

  • Garden Face of Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill from the back patio
    Composite of three photographs from a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

    Old Pa Pitt had intended to place this picture with the rest of the pictures of Robin Hill the other day, but his automatic stitching software failed him. He had been reasonably careful in taking the three photographs so that they would line up nearly perfectly, but the stitching software produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry. What went wrong? Only because Father Pitt was stubborn enough to edit the “control points” himself—“control points” being identical features marked in two pictures, so that the software knows how to align them properly—did he discover the problem. The parade of identical windows was too much for the program. The extreme symmetry caused it to identify this window as the same as that window, which caused the whole building to collapse in a heap.

    So old Pa Pitt stubbornly picked out all the control points himself, and produced a nearly perfect rendering of the garden side of the mansion. Stubbornness is a character flaw, but it has its uses.