Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.
For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.
Potomac Avenue is a good example of the suburban neighborhood business district of the early twentieth century, and one of the pleasantest shopping streets in the South Hills. Here are just a few of the storefronts.
The Spanish Mission style was especially popular in Dormont. To make a building Spanish Mission style, you put a tiled overhang along the top of the façade. Done. This building, incidentally, is still home to the Potomac Bakery, which as of this writing has been here for 99 years.
There was a time, not too long ago, when almost every neighborhood business district had a Murphy’s variety store. This one is now a pool hall, but it has changed very little on the outside.
This is the building at the corner of West Liberty Avenue and Potomac Avenue; we have pictures of the West Liberty Avenue end as well. It is decorated with conventional but pretty terra-cotta panels.
Frederick Sauer was the architect of this ornate commercial palace, built in 1908. It is covered in white enameled terra-cotta ornaments that give it a sense of opulence above its budget.
We also have some earlier pictures of the Werner Building and some remarks on its history.
Designed in 1902 by the Beezer Brothers, this was Wilkinsburg’s contribution to the early skyscraper age. It was put up for Leopold Vilsack, a real-estate investor who was also one of the founders of the Iron City brewery. He named it for his son Carl; later it became known as the Shields Building.
When it was announced, the building was to have eight floors. One floor fell away between initial design and construction.
The building is now apartments. The base has been refurbished with a simpler and more abstract design that hardly registers as different from the original until we look at it closely.
The cap is festooned with elaborate Baroque terra-cotta ornaments.
Alden & Harlow were the architects of this classically symmetrical school, which was built in 1926. Alden had died in 1908, and Harlow had only another year to live (he died in 1927); it seems that by this time much of the design work in the firm was done by Howard K. Jones. The school now is kept in good shape as the home of various community services.
The 1920s were in the middle of the golden age of terra-cotta ornament.
The architects had a typically Pittsburghish lot to deal with, so the school has four floors above ground on the Wallace Avenue front and two in the rear on North Avenue.
The North Avenue entrance is reached by a bridge over a sort of trench that exposes the windows of the floor below.
The most extraordinary riot of polychrome terra cotta in Pittsburgh greets students coming into this school, still in use as the Catalyst Academy charter school. The architect was Edward Weber, who was commissioned by the Pittsburgh school system’s supervising architect Marion Steen; the school was built in 1937–1938.
On a school that is full of surprises, the second-most-surprising thing is the “five races of man” frieze that runs along the top of the front. In the early twentieth century, it was common to divide the human species into five “races”: African, Asian, Caucasian, American Indian, and Australian. Modern scientists would say that the “five races” theory is untenable, but it was widely accepted in the 1930s, and this school was topped with a visual assertion that it would be for everybody.
Caucasian Man looks quite surprised to find himself stuck in a frieze.
We said that the “five races of man” were the second-most-surprising thing about the school. The most surprising thing is the Aztec or Central American influence in the decoration. It was very rare for American architects to look to the Americas for inspiration, and almost unheard-of in Pittsburgh: the only other significant example old Pa Pitt can think of at the moment is the South Park Golf Club by Henry Hornbostel.
This entrance seems plain after the explosion of terra cotta at the two main entrances, but the details are carefully balanced. Note the textured brickwork, with a brick sticking out at regular intervals to create shadowed detail on what would otherwise be a plain brick wall.
Even the grates are unique works of metal art.
A commercial building on Penn Avenue with a well-preserved terra-cotta front whose distinctive Art Deco decorations were worth picking out with a long lens.
Thomas Scott designed this palatial waterworks, which stands in a little enclave of the city of Pittsburgh on the north shore of the Allegheny just outside Aspinwall. As he did with the Mission Pumping Station on the South Side Slopes, he decorated this one with elaborate grotesque heads and other classical effusions.
This Renaissance palace was designed for Rachel and Mortimer Miller by Maximilian Nirdlinger, whose name is at the top of old Pa Pitt’s list of architects whose names are the most fun to say.1 It was built in 1904, when Nirdlinger was still young; with eye-catching but respectable designs like this one, he established himself as a favorite house designer among the Social Register set.
Two doors up the street from St. Michael’s School is this colorful little building, of whose history old Pa Pitt knows nothing. Perhaps someone better informed can reveal it to us in the comments. Father Pitt thought it might have been part of St. Michael’s parish, but old maps do not seem to suggest that it was. Whatever it was, its colorful tile arches and terra-cotta ornaments are worth preserving, and we are happy to see it so well maintained.
