This is almost unique in Pittsburgh: an apartment building that curves into a crescent shape to follow the curve in the street. It is deliberately given a Georgian look to remind us of the crescents in London. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to determine an architect yet; the complex was built for James A. Wilson in 1903. In 2011 it was restored under the supervision of Landmarks Design Associates.
The big building included storefronts as well as apartments.
Wallingford Street is only two blocks long, but its rich assortment of houses in various styles makes it worth a visit for anyone who enjoys admiring old houses. The street is especially rich in examples of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Georgian revival. Without any more introduction, here are some of the houses on the north side of the street.
Addendum: According to a correspondent, the house above was built as his own home by the architect Stanley Pyzdrowski, best known for many Catholic churches in the Pittsburgh area.
Linden Avenue in Point Breeze filled up fairly slowly from the 1880s on, and it has always been a desirable neighborhood, so it is a museum of good domestic architecture from many different eras. The wide variety of houses makes it a very pleasant street for an afternoon stroll. We have already seen the Frank Alden house and the Joseph Langfitt mansion; here are some more Linden Avenue houses from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Earlier known as the Deniston School, and now known as the Swissvale Schoolhouse Condominiums. Rieger & Currier (whose name is misspelled Courrier, Carrier, and any number of other ways in construction listings, but Currier is the spelling he used in his own signature) were the architects of this square Georgian school, built in 1902.
The best old Pa Pitt can say about those outsized dormers that sprouted on the front recently is that they could be worse, and they could be scraped off in a future restoration with minimal damage to the appearance of the building.
It is very difficult to get a good look at this building, even in the winter, on account of the lush growth of woods that doubtless makes it a very pleasant place inside. Nevertheless, old Pa Pitt felt obliged to try, since it was one of the dwindling number of landmarks with no picture on Wikipedia’s List of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation Historic Landmarks. It was put up for a women’s club in 1940; the architects were Ingham & Boyd, who also designed Mount Lebanon High School around the corner (as well as all the other schools in Mount Lebanon). For this small clubhouse, they adopted a simplified Georgian style that made it a good neighbor on an otherwise residential street—and indeed it is now a private home.
These two houses both show an unusually ornate, almost baroque, form of Georgian style, and we imagine they were drawn by the same hand. They both now belong to the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Archdiocese.
The half-round projection on the front porch makes both an impressive and a welcoming entrance.
Picking out your baroque details in this color of paint is the next best thing to using actual gold leaf.
The carriage house matches the main house, right down to the distinctive lintels over the windows.
This house, which is now the chancery for the Archdiocese, has suffered a few more alterations. The big square window in the gable is not old Pa Pitt’s favorite thing, but it probably makes for a bright storage room.
Regular readers might have been disappointed if we had not included a good utility cable.
Perhaps it is stretching a point to call this first one a mansion, but it is a big house built with the best materials.
A Georgian mansion that would look at home in Annapolis or Williamsburg.
A different and less pedantically correct take on Colonial Revival. Note the shutters that actually shut.
The garage has a comfortable apartment for your chauffeur.
The Smith mansion is built of very dark brick in a subdued Flemish Renaissance style. Appropriately, the bricks are laid in Flemish bond.
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.
