Father Pitt

Tag: German Victorian

  • German Victorian on the South Side Slopes

    2500 South 18th Street

    This has the look of a “hotel” in the Pittsburgh sense: a bar with rooms upstairs, thus qualifying for the much more readily available hotel liquor license. It still has a bar on the ground floor. The style is what old Pa Pitt calls “South Hills German Victorian,” and indeed a glance at the plat maps shows that this part of the Slopes was thoroughly German when this building went up shortly before 1910. The whole triangle bounded by South 18th Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Street (now Monastery Avenue) was owned by Elizabeth Lenert.

    Entrance

    When your building has an acute angle, but not sharply acute, one way of dealing with it is to put the entrance there and make the corner into a feature rather than something that looks like an unfortunate necessity. The rocket-shaped turret on this building acts like a hinge to make it feel as though the building was meant to fold into this shape.

    Turret
    Cornice

    Otherwise, this is not an elaborate building, but the clever arrangement of bricks at the top of the 18th Street side makes an attractive cornice that doesn’t fall down.

    Chimney pots

    We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.

    Corner Café
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The building would have had a much more dignified and balanced appearance before the ground-floor storefront was filled in; but since a corner bar is close in spirit to a men’s club, patrons should be grateful that it has windows at all.

  • Two Hotels in Sharpsburg

    Lafayette Hotel

    Sharpsburg has a paucity of street names and has to double up on many of them. At the western end of the borough, Main Street splits into two Main Streets. On South Main Street we find two similar hotels from the 1890s, both in the kind of German classical-Romanesque hybrid style that old Pa Pitt has learned to call Rundbogenstil. “Hotel” meant “neighborhood bar with rooms for rent”; such hotels popped up in neighborhoods everywhere in our area, because it was much easier to get a liquor license for a hotel than for a bar.

    First, the Lafayette Hotel (probably not its original name), which not only still has a lively and beloved bar on the ground floor, but even still has rooms for rent.

    Entrance
    96 on the date stone

    The date stone: built in 1896.

    H in a decoration

    This probably tells us the initial of the original name of the hotel.

    Stained glass

    An oval stained-glass window.

    A block away, we have the Sharpsburger Hotel, now apartments.

    Sharpsburger hotel
    1893 on the date stone

    Built in 1893.

    Fourth St. street sign on the side of the building

    A bit of Romanesque carved foliage and a street sign that probably dates from the 1890s. Old Pa Pitt is collecting old street signs on the sides of buildings, by the way, which was the usual place for them in the 1800s. Both these hotels retain their corner signs.

    Sharpsburger Hotel

  • Matz Furniture Building, Allentown

    Ghost sign

    Until fairly recently, almost all the businesses along Warrington Avenue in Allentown bore German names. This building still bears a ghost sign for Geo. Matz & Sons Furniture and Carpets. The style of the building is typical German Commercial Romanesque, of the sort that is very common in the old German neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The storefront has been filled in with Perma-Stone, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the windows have been replaced with smaller standard-sized windows (with fake “multi-pane” slats, because window companies insist on adding those even though they look completely wrong on most buildings from the middle nineteenth century onwards). But both those things could be undone when Allentown becomes trendy enough to make restoration worthwhile, and otherwise the façade of the building is very well preserved.

    Matz Building

  • Limbach Building, Allentown

    Limbach Building

    This corner building with its German dome is an especially fine example of the style old Pa Pitt describes as German Victorian, which flourished in the German neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Allentown is teetering on the brink of becoming the next trendy neighborhood; we hope it succeeds.

  • H. Daub Building, West End

    No one has to ask when this distinguished Victorian commercial building was constructed. There was a brief time about fifteen years ago when the West End looked like the next trendy artsy neighborhood—for example, you can just barely make out that this building briefly housed a Steinway piano dealer. It seems that the neighborhood was too far out of the way for the arts community to take firm roots. The neighborhood is still pleasant, but much of the business district is deserted.