Father Pitt

Tag: Noblestown Road

  • Two Old Houses in Noblestown

    7317 Noblestown Road

    This old house was probably built in the middle 1800s, but the simple vernacular style of it makes it hard to date with any precision. It was obviously put up at a time when the main street of Noblestown was more a path than a road; now anyone stepping out the front door has to be careful of traffic. (The church in the background is the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church.)

    House next to Noblestown Road
    House by Noblestown Road
    7314 Noblestown Road
    Olympus E-20N.

    This somewhat larger house is almost identical in layout; it probably just has larger rooms in the main part of the house. The porch is a later addition—probably from the first quarter of the twentieth century, to judge by the Craftsman-style tapered pillars and rusticated concrete blocks.

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  • Oakdale

    Shops on Noblestown Road, Oakdale

    Oakdale is a pleasant little borough in the western suburbs. The town was devastated by floods from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and some of it never recovered; but the back streets are full of pleasant houses, and the business district has business in it, and the population is growing.

    Shops on Noblestown Road in Oakdale

    The tiny urban core of Oakdale is a row of shops on Noblestown Road.

    5021 Noblestown Road, Oakdale

    This building, 120 years old this year, has kept its corner entrance.

    Corner entrance
    100 Clinton Avenue

    The odd polygonal end of this building probably had large showroom windows at one time.

    Old service station

    Finally, an old service station. Few old-fashioned service stations have survived without massive alterations, but this one still keeps its attractive little red-roofed hut with—once again—a corner entrance.

    Old service station
    Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church

    Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Yesterday we looked at the Oakdale Public School, one of the earliest commissions for James E. Allison. Here, just a short distance to the west in the old village of Noblestown, is another Allison building1 from a little over a year later—a small frame church that, although it has been coated with artificial siding, still retains some of its distinctive character. The form is the irregular square popular in small Romanesque churches of Victorian times, but the details are Georgian, including the big window. The half-round protrusion in front indicates a Sunday-school room built on the popular Akron Plan. The congregation dissolved a few years ago, but the building is in use by a veterans’ organization called Heroes Supporting Heroes.

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