Father Pitt

Tag: Negley Avenue

  • House Turned Synagogue in Highland Park

    House turned synagogue

    Several synagogues in Pittsburgh have been adapted from private houses—one of them half a block away from here. This one seems no longer to be a synagogue, so it has gone from residential to institutional to residential again. The inscription is mostly in Hebrew, which old Pa Pitt regrets that he does not read, so perhaps a reader can inform us which congregation was here. The English part of the inscription memorializes Mr. & Mrs. Bennie Fineberg, perhaps the donors.

    We could try to imagine what the front of this house looked like before its conversion. But we needn’t put in the effort, because a nearly identical house is right next door:

    A similar house

    This one has been converted to apartments, and it has suffered some alterations, but nothing that takes very much imagination to remove in our mind’s eye and restore the original look of the house.

  • Pittsburgh Foursquare in Highland Park

    House on Negley Avenue at Jackson Street

    A particularly grand version of the Pittsburgh Foursquare house, this house on Negley Avenue at Jackson Street was one of four in a row built in the early 1900s for James Parker, who had a small real-estate empire in the nearby streets.

    From a 1910 map at Pittsburgh Historic Maps.

    All four were almost certainly designed by the same hand, and all four still stand in beautiful condition today.

  • Second United Presbyterian Church, Highland Park

    Second United Presbyterian Church

    This church has an unusually eclectic history. It began as the Second United Presbyterian Church. Father Pitt does not know the original architect, but in 1915 there was a devastating fire, and a large reconstruction project was supervised by the architect John Louis Beatty. In 1933 the Presbyterians moved out, and this became the East End Baptist Church. Now it is the Union Project (an arts venue) and the meeting-place of the Jonah’s Call Anglican congregation.

    About two and a half years ago, old Pa Pitt published some pictures of this church, but something seemed different about it. It took a moment to realize: the decorative details on the tower have been cleaned. Back in 2021, all the stone had been cleaned except for the very top of the tower:

    Tower with soot still on it

    But now the tower is clean to its very tip:

    Top of the tower cleaned
    Second U. P. Church
    Union Project
    Main entrance
    Main entrance again
    Gothic arch
    Pinnacle
    Black pinnacle

    This little pinnacle is still the color the whole church used to be.

    East End Baptist Church

    Map showing the location of the church.

  • The Witches’ Caps on Negley Avenue

    625 to 633 South Negley Avenue

    This row of Queen Anne houses on Negley Avenue in Shadyside surely strikes every passer-by, if for nothing other than their turrets with witches’ caps. The other details are also worth noticing: the ornamental woodwork and the roof slates, for example. The houses are just detached enough that we can see that the sides are made of cheaper brick rather than the stone that faces the street.

    629 South Negley Avenue

    The last one in the row lost its cap many years ago, but in compensation has been ultra-Victorianized with extra polychrome woodwork, as we see on the dormer below.

    Dormer

  • Negley No. 1 and No. 2, East Liberty

    Negley No. 1 and No. 2

    A matched set of probably doomed apartment buildings at the intersection of Negley Avenue and Rural Street, seen on an appropriately gloomy day. They were built between 1910 and 1923, and although they are mostly utilitarian boxes of apartments, their fronts are distinctive and interesting.

    Front of Negley No. 2

    The treatment of the balconies creates a pleasingly complex rhythm, with broad and shallow rounded arches at the top, and slightly peaked Jacobean arches on the two lower floors. The windows in the center may have been stained glass, long since replaced when they were sold either by thieves or by an owner who could not afford to maintain them. The brick quoins add pleasing complexity to the texture.

    From opposite corner

    Some kind of cornice or decorative strip has done missing from the fronts, revealing cheaper red brick behind it that was never meant to be seen.

  • Congregation B’nai Israel, East Liberty

    Congregation B’nai Israel

    Henry Hornbostel designed two prominent synagogues in Pittsburgh. The still-prospering Rodef Shalom is familiar to everyone, partly because it sits at the eastern end of the Fifth Avenue monument row in Oakland and Shadyside. This one, built in 1923, is perhaps a more adventurous design. Hornbostel used old and new materials and design elements from different traditions to create a building that immediately looked as if it had been there for a millennium or more. After a few years as a school, it is now in the midst of being repurposed as apartments.

    Technically, according to the neighborhood border that goes up the middle of Negley Avenue on the city planning map, this building is in Garfield. Socially, it is more associated with East Liberty.

    B’nai Israel
    Frieze
    Entrance
    Porch
    The round part
    Another view

  • Art Deco Apartment Building, East Liberty

    Abandoned Art Deco apartment building

    Art Deco is not very common in Pittsburgh, although there were a few Art Deco apartment buildings in the East End. Here is one on Negley Avenue that probably will not be with us much longer; it looks as though it is scheduled to be replaced. It is a late Art Deco style; old Pa Pitt would guess it dates from the 1950s. Most of the building is just a modernist block, but the horizontal stripes give it more than average decorative flair, and the vertical forms of the entrance lift it into the realm of Art Deco.

    Front

  • Apartment Building on Negley Avenue, Shadyside

    Apartment building on Negley Avenue

    A small apartment building in a vernacular Tudor style; its battlemented bay sets it apart from other apartment buildings in the neighborhood.

    Apartment building

    Addendum: This building, to judge by old maps, appears to have been a large-scale expansion of a single-family house, which was swallowed up in the new construction. Thanks to a commenter, we tentatively identify the apartment building as a design by Henry M. Kropff, built in 1912.

  • The Admiral Apartments, Shadyside

    A simple modernist brick box is given an Art Deco flair by distinctively patterned brickwork.

  • Third Presbyterian Church, Shadyside

    The “chocolate church” at Fifth and Negley was designed by Theophilus P. Chandler Jr., whose name always sounds to old Pa Pitt like the villain in a Marx Brothers farce. Chandler worked mostly in Philadelphia, but he also designed First Presbyterian downtown and the Duncan mausoleum in the Union Dale Cemetery.