Father Pitt

Tag: Thomas (William Arthur)

  • Double Duplexes on Neeld Avenue, Beechview

    Double duplex on Neeld Avenue

    These double duplexes represent a common phenomenon in the streetcar neighborhoods that developed around the turn of the twentieth century. They were built for C. M. Neeld in 1916 on land that his family had owned for generations. When the streetcar line was pushed through from downtown in 1905, the Neelds found that their old family homes were right on the car line, and thus right in the path of speedy development. They profited by developing some of their land, but they kept a whole city block for themselves until after the Second World War. These apartments—twelve of them in three buildings—would have turned some of the vacant land into a good steady income that couldn’t be matched by the small farming the Neelds had probably done before the streetcars came.

    Front elevation
    Three double duplexes

    Father Pitt guesses that the architect was William Arthur Thomas, who favored this white face brick and designed other similar duplexes in Beechview.1

    Double duplex

    The lowest of the three preserves its original details best. The one at the top of the slope has been altered the most, with mid-twentieth-century “picture” windows replacing the original much larger windows.

    Upper double duplex
    Original windows

    The one in the middle preserves these original small windows in the stairwells.

    Dormer
    Segmental pediment
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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  • Duplex in Beechview by W. A. Thomas

    1401–1403 Beechview Avenue

    William Arthur Thomas designed this First-World-War-era duplex,1 which is typical of the better class of Pittsburgh duplexes: it offers two spacious apartments (plus attic and basement), each with more square footage than many city houses. Thomas was very fond of white Kittanning brick, to judge by the number of his buildings that made use of it.

    Duplex in Beechview
    Duplex
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Olympus E-20N.
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  • Apartment Buildings by W. A. Thomas on Friendship Park, Bloomfield

    Apartment building at 4901 Friendship Avenue

    This striking building, which dates from about 1906, was designed by W. A. (for William Arthur) Thomas, a prolific architect and developer who is almost forgotten today. It’s time for a Thomas revival, Father Pitt thinks, because wherever he went, Thomas left the city more beautiful and more interesting.

    Apartment building at 4901 Friendship Avenue

    The most attention-getting part of this building is the tower of half-round balconies in the front, and here the design is amazingly eclectic. Corinthian capitals on the pilasters and abstract cubical capitals on the columns—and then, on the third floor, tapered Craftsman-style pillars. But we don’t see a disordered mess. It all fits together in one composition.

    Apartment building at 4901 Friendship Avenue
    Apartment building at 4901 Friendship Avenue

    Now, it’s possible that the interesting mixture of styles was the product of later revisions. But we are inclined to attribute an experimental spirit to Mr. Thomas. At the other end of the block…

    Apartment building at 4925 Friendship Avenue

    This building is so similar that we are certainly justified in attributing it to Thomas as well unless strong evidence to the contrary comes in. But it is not identical. Here the columns go all the way up, and they terminate in striking Art Nouveau interpretations of classical capitals.

    Balcony

    Volutes and acanthus leaves are standard decorations for classical capitals, but the proportions and the arrangement are original.

    Apartment building at 4925 Friendship Avenue
    Apartment building at 4925 Friendship Avenue
    Olympus E-20N.

    A fourth floor of cheaper modern materials has been added, but the addition was deliberately arranged to be unobtrusive, or indeed almost invisible from the street. Most passers-by will never even notice it.

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  • Sochatoff Building (Crawford Grill), Hill District

    Top of the Sochatoff Building

    William Arthur Thomas, who was very active in the Hill District, was the architect of this building, which is famous in jazz lore as the location of the second Crawford Grill.

    Crawford Grill

    The Crawford Grill lingered on into our current century, the last and most famous of the Wylie Avenue jazz clubs. (Father Pitt took the picture above in 2000.) It was in some ways a victim of its own success: it moved to the Freighthouse Shops at Station Square just when shopping arcades in general were beginning to decline, and closed there after a few years.

    Sochatoff Building
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    Today the building has been stabilized (though the fine Queen Anne house next to it could not be saved), and there is some hope that it can be an asset to the community again. We may yet hear the wail of a saxophone coming through that front door.

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