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Bracket
Ornamental bracket on a storefront on Carson Street. -
Art Nouveau Stained Glass on Carson Street
The Art Nouveau style never made much headway in Pittsburgh, but there are a few examples of ornamentation in a style that deserves that name—especially stained glass, which lends itself to the kind of abstraction we associate with Art Nouveau. This window is in a storefront near the Birmingham Bridge.
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Victorian Storefronts on Carson Street
A pair of storefronts in a commercial building between 15th and 16th Streets. The decorations are very well preserved—enlarge the picture to see how the ornaments in the carved cornice match the keystones in the flattened arches. Notice also the recessed entrances. Old Pa Pitt is still astonished that we have forgotten the reason for those. The reason is that, if the entrance were flush with the sidewalk, someone leaving the store could swing the door out into a passing pedestrian’s face. This happens more often than we realize in modern storefronts, or old ones that have been modernized, and apparently the reaction each time is “Who could have seen that coming?”—to which the answer is “Any Victorian architect.”
Note the distinctive beehive ornament in the middle of the building that serves as the date stone.
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Victorian Commercial Buildings on the Boulevard of the Allies
Among the few human-sized buildings left in the area, these two at the corner of Stanwix Street are dwarfed by the skyscrapers around them. The large windows suggest workshops of some sort on the upper floors; the tasteful ornamentation suggests prosperity.
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Spanish Mission Style in Dormont
A modest commercial building on Potomac Avenue, this is a good example of the Spanish Mission style in commercial buildings and apartment houses. The style—a kind of Eastern fantasy of the Southwest—is certainly not unknown elsewhere in the Pittsburgh area, but for some reason it was especially popular in Dormont, where numerous Mission-style buildings still stand. Doubtless the original roof overhang above the name was tile, and very probably green tile. Below, the building at Potomac and Glenmore Avenues retains its original green roof tiles.
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Minnetonka Building, Shadyside
Most pedestrians on Walnut Street pass this building without noticing it; at best they may glance at the rounded corners, but otherwise it strikes them as just another modernist building. It is in fact one of the very earliest outbreaks of modernism in Pittsburgh: it was designed by Frederick Scheibler and opened in 1908. It must have been startlingly modern indeed surrounded by Edwardian Shadyside.
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Second Empire Storefront on Carson Street
The cornice and dormers are fine specimens of Victorian woodwork.
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Apartment Building, 17th and Sarah Streets, South Side
This modest apartment building (it looks as though the ground floor used to be a store) is enlivened by interesting brickwork.
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Cast-Iron Ornament
On a storefront on Carson Street, South Side.
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Founder’s Mark on a Cast-Iron Storefront
Last week old Pa Pitt published this picture of a cast-iron storefront on 18th Street, South Side.
Today, walking past the same building, he noticed an inscription at the base.
This is the mark of the founder who cast the storefront, and we see that it was a very local business: East Birmingham was the borough that went from today’s 17th Street to about 27th Street.
