Allegheny West never quite became a slum, but it was down on its luck for a while. Over the past few decades it has very gradually turned into an expensive and trendy neighborhood, and the Western Avenue business district is lively and full of interesting one-off restaurants and shops. In a short stroll, we see some of the variety of commercial and domestic buildings that line one side of the street.
Originally a Catholic hospital, later known as just Pittsburgh Hospital. Now it is the Champion City Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The main building was put up in about 1902; the architects were Schickel & Ditmars of New York,1 who were most famous for Catholic churches, including the immense Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark, but also designed a number of hospitals.
The addition on the Frankstown Avenue end has not weathered well.
Postwar additions might have been designed by Press C. Dowler, who we know designed the School of Nursing behind the hospital in 1946 (which we’ll see soon).
Five houses on North Franklin Street epitomize the paradox of Manchester: three are gorgeously restored, and two are condemned. This one, one of the condemned, had a little corner store on the ground floor.
We’ll find these incised decorations on all but one the houses. They were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s.
This house and the one next to it are nearly identical, except for differences in decoration. They were probably put up at the same time.
This house has a plaque dating it to 1881.
This house is probably the most recent of the lot; from the style, we would date it to the 1890s.
This house has been up for sale for a couple of years now, so the owner is probably motivated to sell. A quarter-million dollars should be enough to get that blue sticker off the front.
This little house is one of the few survivors from the days when much of Carson Street in East Birmingham was residential. It preserves most of its fine mid-Victorian Italianate detail, so it is worth a closer look than most pedestrians on the busy sidewalk of Carson Street usually give it.
One unfortunate change is the entrance. Instead of double doors with an art-glass transom, we have a stock door from the home center and pieces of plywood around it. But the elaborate woodwork surrounding the entrance is still intact.
It is typical of Italianate houses that the downstairs windows are very tall. This is the bright and cheerful branch of Victorian domestic architecture.
The windowsills rest on ornate iron brackets.
Two houses that both seem to date from the Civil War era; they both appear on an 1872 plat map of Allegheny City. This one has just had some spiffing up. It is an Italianate variant of the typical Pennsylvania I-house with an addition in the back (although the addition in this case may have been part of the original plan). It has been divided into two dwellings, but the outlines of the house and many of its details are well preserved.
The outline of the house on the 1872 maps shows the wing in the rear, so it is at least that old.
This house was inhabited until recently; it looks as though it had a fire and is undergoing repairs. It has a more complicated history. It also appears on the 1872 map, and later maps that distinguish the materials of buildings show that this was a wood-frame house. At some point around 1900 it was divided into two dwellings. Some time after 1923 it was sheathed in buff Kittanning brick, giving us an 1860s form with 1920s exterior details.
It is the northeastern corner of Shadyside now, but this house was built in the neighborhood that developed around the East Liberty station, which was not far from where the East Liberty station is today—now a busway station, but on the same route. This house was built in the 1880s for a family named McCully, to judge by old maps. It has been divided into three apartments, but it has kept many of its 1880s details.
This entrance is probably a replacement for a front porch that ran the width of the building.
The original carved wooden brackets include the abstract cutout botanical decorations that were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s
Hazelwood was a famously Hungarian neighborhood, and several kinds of Hungarian churches sprouted there. The cornerstone of this church was laid one hundred years ago today on December 20, 1925, but it’s not much different in front from the vernacular Gothic churches of half a century earlier.
If we walk around the side of this church, though, we see what is really unusual about it: it grows out of a big old Italianate house built in the 1870s.
The new building was dedicated on May 16, 1926.
The congregation is long gone, but the church now belongs to an organization called “Center of Life.”
The old house has some very fine woodwork, which we hope can be preserved.
Some of the stained glass has fallen to pieces. It is expensive to restore stained glass, but the Union Project in Highland Park made restoring stained glass a community-education project, with spectacular results.
Without moving an inch, these old houses have been on three different streets. They were built, probably just after the Civil War (since they appear on an 1872 plat map), on Chestnut Street. After the conquest of Allegheny by Pittsburgh, duplicate street names were eliminated—most often by changing the ones on the North Side, but in this case the Chestnut Street in what had been Allegheny was richer and more influential, so this became Hooper Street, defying the usual rule that the new name should begin with the same letter as the old. When the Lower Hill was deleted by “urban renewal,” Hooper and Washington Streets were merged to make Chatham Square. Through it all, these fairly modest houses have remained intact, and they seem secure now that Uptown is becoming more desirable again.
A pair of rowhouses whose elaborate Italianate details have been meticulously restored. And since, as longtime readers know, old Pa Pitt collects breezeways…
