The old Mount Oliver Public School and its annex have been beautifully restored for non-academic uses. Mount Oliver residents now get their schooling from Pittsburgh.
The Annex is almost a duplicate of the original school, except for the tower section.
Addendum: The Annex is the work of the local Mount Oliver architect Albert C. Storch.1 Since it is a near-duplicate of the original building, we provisionally credit that one to Storch as well.
The Construction Record, September 20, 1913: “Contractors Davidson & Klein, Mt. Oliver, have started foundations for a two-story brick grade school annex, to be erected on Carmon street, Mt . Oliver, for the Board of Education. Plans by Architect Albert Storch, Bausman street, Mt. Oliver. Cost $30,000.” “Carmon street” is a misprint for “Carbon Street,” the former name of Hays Avenue. This was a very sloppily edited magazine. ↩︎
The line between painted and unpainted on this long building is an artifact of its history. For most of its life this building was divided in two parts: the painted part was the convent, and the unpainted part the orphan asylum. More recently it has been a Franciscan retreat center known as the Burning Bush House of Prayer, whose somewhat archaic site tells us that the building was put up “in three stages, from 1887 to 1889.”
Here is an example of something you never see old Pa Pitt do. The usual jungle of utility cables infested this picture, and Father Pitt took them out. It’s not a perfect job, but it looks good from this distance. Having demonstrated that he is capable of doing it, Father Pitt may never do it again, but it does give us a good look at the front of an interesting old church.
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church is the oldest open church in Lawrenceville: that is to say, it is the one that has been worshiping in the same building continuously for the longest time. This building was finished in 1874, and it has not changed much since then. In style it is a typical small Pittsburgh church of the time, with a shallow-pitched roof, the walls divided in sections by simple pilasters, and crenellations under the roofline. This is the Romanesque variant of that style. It could be made Gothic by swapping the rounded arches for pointed arches; it could be made classical by adding a few classical decorative elements.
The inscription reads “3.te Deutsche ev. Lutherische Zions Kirche” (“Third German Evangelical Lutheran Zion’s Church”). Someone has traced the date “1823” in white on the date stone in the gable. Father Pitt believes it is a mistake, although he would be happy to be corrected by anyone who knows better. The records indicate that the congregation was founded in 1868; the building opened in March of 1874, so the date 1873 would be plausible. Perhaps layers of paint made the date indistinct, and a painter misread the 7.
Here is the church with the utility cables. Father Pitt had the energy to remove them from one picture, but after that he had to lie down for a while. Since, however, these pictures are all licensed with a public-domain-equivalent CC0 license, nothing stops any motivated readers from adopting the photograph and spending the afternoon eliminating the cables—and that utility pole while they’re at it.
John T. Comès, one of our best ecclesiastical architects, accepted the challenge of an almost impossible site and came up with this distinctive design for a Polish parish. It was built between 1909 and 1916.
According to the South Side Slopes site, “The church closed permanently after a section of ceiling collapsed about the casket of the last caretaker during his funeral mass.” This is the sort of detail a novelist would invent and then throw out as too implausible for a sophisticated audience.
Charles Bickel was one of our most prolific architects of medium-sized commercial buildings. He was versatile and adaptable, as we see here in two buildings of very similar dimensions and very different styles, built within two years of each other. Above, the Maginn Building, from 1897, in a very Richardsonian Romanesque idiom; it is currently being converted into—who would have guessed?—luxury loft apartments. Below, from 1895, the United Presbyterian Board of Publications Building, in a pure Beaux-Arts classical style.
One of our endangered landmarks: it has been closed as a church for six years now, and no one seems to know what else to do with it. A community group wants to preserve it as a community resource, but it takes money to keep up a magnificent church. Allentown seems to be metamorphosing into a trendy neighborhood, but not very quickly into an expensive neighborhood—which is a good thing for the residents, but a bad thing for the prospect of making anything profitable out of this building.
Allentown was a German neighborhood, and this church was designed by a German architect (Herman J. Lang) for a German congregation. The church was finished in 1912. It has its own Wikipedia article, which identifies it as an example of “the German Romanesque architectural style, an American derivative of the Rundbogenstil style.” Father Pitt approves of that description, because he likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.” We have pillaged most of the rest of our information from that article.
St. Michael’s is one of our earliest grand Romanesque churches, finished in 1861. It was designed for a German congregation by the German-born Charles F. Bartberger, who gave us a number of other distinguished ecclesiastical buildings. (He is often confused with Charles M. Bartberger, his son, who gave us a number of distinguished schools.) It was one of the first churches around here to be made into condominium apartments, so it is now preserved as the Angel’s Arms.
It was a rainy day today, and if you enlarge the picture you can pick out the falling raindrops.
Note the date over this side door.
The rectory, which is attached to the eastern end of the church, was built in 1890 and designed by another distinguished German Pittsburgh architect: Frederick Sauer, who gave us many fine churches and the whimsical Sauer Buildings in Aspinwall. Here he has created a very German Romanesque building that harmonizes well with the older church.
A very German corner dome.
Exceptionally fine carved foliage at the entrance to the rectory.
The double arch inside a single arch, with a circle to fill in the gap, is characteristic of the style of classically influenced Romanesque the Germans called Rundbogenstil, the round-arch style. It may not be exclusive to the Rundbogenstil, but Father Pitt likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.” The B. M. Kramer and Co. building on the South Side, built as a beer warehouse, is one of the masterpieces of industrial architecture in Pittsburgh.
Architecturally this house is a bit of a mess, but a pleasing mess. It was built in three different stages, the first in 1870 and the last in 1900.
The Thaw family was a bit of a mess, too. William Thaw was a railroad baron who made all the money in the world and had ten surviving children by two wives. Of those children, the one everybody remembers was Harry Thaw, who murdered Stanford White in front of as many witnesses as could possibly be crammed into one nightclub. It was the climax of a career of difficult situations, and in every one of them Harry’s mother used the mighty power of money to extract him from his difficulties. (Harry used money to light cigars with.) You can read about his murder of White and the legal adventures that followed in Harry Thaw’s Wikipedia article; for our purposes it is sufficient to say that the family money saved his hide again, and Clarence Darrow provided him with a nifty new defense called “temporary insanity.” Many who knew Harry Thaw would question the temporariness of the insanity.
This was not the Thaws’ biggest house. Their favorite architect, Theophilus P. Chandler Jr., designed a house for them in Squirrel Hill named Lyndhurst; that one was demolished in the 1940s.
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.
