Built in 1927, this was a lodge for the Knights of Malta, one of those Masonic orders that old Pa Pitt has never sorted out. Most North Siders remember it as the Salvation Army building. It narrowly escaped demolition in 2008, and now it is in good shape again and ready for its next life.
An assortment of styles from a block and a half of North Avenue facing the Commons in old Allegheny. These houses are now included in the Mexican War Streets Historic District. First, a tall and narrow Queen Anne house built in the 1880s.
This Queen Anne has a larger lot and thus more room to spread out and grow picturesque projections.
These three houses probably go back to the Civil War era; they are typical of the larger sort of houses that grew all over Pittsburgh from the beginning until the middle 1800s, when more elaborate styles came into fashion.
It is not easy to guess the age of these little houses. Old Pa Pitt’s best speculation, judging from old maps, is that they also go back to the Civil War era, but had their fronts modernized at some time around 1900. The one on the left may have had its front replaced more than once before it finally ended up with this Craftsman-style stucco treatment.
Finally, another house from the 1880s, this one with particularly elaborate woodwork.
Isaac Wertheimer, who made his money in the distilling business, had this house built in 1892. The late Carol Peterson wrote a detailed history of the house (PDF), though she did not find the name of the architect. Whoever it was created a romantic composition in the up-to-date Queen Anne style, with the peculiarity that the house appears from the front to be a good bit smaller than it actually is. A view of the side reveals three and a half floors of picturesque angles and projections.
The Second Empire style is a good fit for high-class rowhouses, because it was created specifically to stuff the most usable volume into the least taxable building. Supposedly it came about because houses in France of Napoleon III’s time were taxed by the area of the rooms, but attics were not counted in the calculation. All the space above the roofline was dismissed as attic by the law; therefore, if the roof could bulge out to make an attic the same size as the other floors, you got an extra floor tax-free. Americans adopted the style because they liked the way it looked and the way it solved the practical problems of space.
This row of seven houses drops a few feet after the first three. Manchester is a flat neighborhood, but only by Pittsburgh standards. Old maps show that the row was built between 1872 and 1882.
A very clever detective might deduce that these pictures were taken on two different visits.
Manchester is known for its splendid brick Victorian houses, but there are blocks of more modest houses as well—often older than the big brick ones. Here is a row of neat little frame houses, some of which appear—from both old maps and the style of the houses—to date back to the Civil War era.
Queen Anne is an expansive style, with turrets and bays and oriels and all kinds of picturesque projections this way and that. When Queen Anne is compressed to the dimensions of a rowhouse, it takes on some of the vocabulary of the Second Empire style, in particular the full third floor under a mansard roof, but adds the irregularity we expect from Queen Anne, with its asymmetry and, of course, its turrets. These two houses on North Avenue are splendidly preserved examples of the collision of the two styles.
This Romanesque warehouse appears from old maps to have been built around the turn of the twentieth century for the Allegheny Transfer Company. It later belonged to Donaldson Transfer, as a ghost sign at the top of the building testifies (enlarge the picture to examine it closely). It has been a few things since then, and it was for sale when old Pa Pitt visited it. If you want a distinctive commercial or even residential space in one of our most pleasant neighborhoods, here is your opportunity.
A few years ago, Father Pitt took a picture of this building in sunset light, but it looks as though he never published it. So here it is now.
In about 1925 the Katsafanas Coffee Company bought this building on North Avenue on the North Side and had the front completely redone in an ultramodern style. Father Pitt does not yet know the architect who supervised the remodeling, but it was obviously someone of rare taste. A renovation of the remodeling, carefully preserving what was preservable, was supervised by Pfaffman & Associates, a firm that has worked on some of our most outstanding restorations and on the sui generis Gateway subway station.
This sign was painted by the A. E Jones Sign Co., which is still in business at 507 Tripoli Street in Dutchtown, and still doing hand-painted signs.
Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000, Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
About five years ago we looked at the Allegheny City Stables in the middle of its adaptation into loft apartments. Now the renovation is complete, and a new apartment building has gone up next door, making this block of North Avenue much more inviting. Technically it is across the street from Allegheny West, but it was the Allegheny West Civic Council that saved the building, and socially it forms part of today’s Allegheny West rather than the rest of the “Central Northside” neighborhood as designated on city planning maps.
A streamlined industrial building on North Avenue. We suspect that the part now filled in with red diamonds may have originally been a storefront or showroom for the business.
