Plat maps seem to show that this carriage house was built, not for the house it sits directly behind, but for the house of C. F. Arrott on the corner of Negley and Ellsworth. The house is now gone, replaced by Rutledge Hall, but the carriage house, which is big enough for a generous private home, is kept in beautiful shape.
When demand exceeds supply in the housing market, as it did for quite a while after the Second World War, apartment buildings can be plain brick boxes. It is enough to say, “Here is a place to live, and if you pinch your pennies you can probably afford it.” But in the 1930s, it was necessary to give people a good reason to pick your building over any of the other places people could live. Thus apartment buildings tended to sell a fantasy: live here and you will be the kind of aristocrat you always knew you deserved to be.
Bellevue Gables peddles that fantasy and does a good job of it. Especially on the Sprague Avenue side, the stone terraces and lush landscaping make the approach to the entrances feel like walking into one of the Stately Homes of England.
Rudolph Berg, Jr., was the owner, the builder, and the architect. He had suffered much in the Depression: when old Pa Pitt went looking for his name in the papers in the 1930s, he had to plow through pages and pages of sheriff’s sales before he came across any construction listings. But by 1939, when Bellevue Gables opened, he seems to have recovered and was ready to get back into the apartment-development business on a grand scale.
The complex is two buildings, one along Sprague Avenue and one along Hawley Avenue.
Lake & Davidson were the architects of this rich building for the rich borough of Edgewood. In 1932, when it was dedicated, it was the subject of a photo feature in the Sun-Telegraph.
The recently completed structure, which resembles a large, handsome residence, will be dedicated informally today and tomorrow. The committee desired a building for a community of self-governing citizens who regard the law as a positive civic expression rather than an agent of punitive repression.
Consequently, Lake and Davidson, the architects, selected the domestic architecture of the law-abiding English. The Tudor style fulfills the conditions governing the design which required that many individual activities be housed. This style consistently permits the incorporation of happily rambling units into a decorative sequence.1
When this building was put up in 1932, the Depression was hitting its stride, and prices for construction had fallen. A borough full of rich people could afford quite a luxurious municipal hall. “The building, moreover, was constructed at a time when prices were low enough to give this community double the value in materials.”
These elaborate lanterns at the entrance are a good example of the materials the borough could afford.
“A unique triumph of the building,” says that same Sun-Telly article, “is the concealment of the great, gaping doors necessary for the fire department, in the north wing at the rear.”
Some details of Hampton Hall, a Tudor apartment building in Oakland designed by H. G. Hodgkins.
Views of the roof of Hampton Hall, a large Tudor apartment building in Oakland designed by H. G. Hodgkins. We also have views of the entrance and courtyard, the lobby, and the front and a perspective view.
Hampton Hall is a grand Tudor apartment palace in Oakland designed by the Chicago architect H. G. Hodgkins.
A while ago one of the residents mentioned to old Pa Pitt that the long canopy that usually leads from the courtyard entrance to the street had come down for work, which—our correspondent pointed out—would make some of the previously hidden details accessible to a camera. Here, from about two and a half years ago, is how the canopy usually looks:
And here is the courtyard without the canopy:
Father Pitt ended up spending an hour or more taking pictures all over the building, and since he has so many pictures, he will split them into multiple articles to avoid wearying his visitors. Today we see the courtyard and the main entrance.
The First German Evangelical Lutheran Church was founded in 1837, and it was downtown, or on the edge of downtown, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue, until the commercial development of downtown Pittsburgh had scattered the congregation and made the land too valuable to keep. We can see from this building that the congregation had money to spend when the church moved to the East End. The architects were the Cleveland firm of Corbusier, Lenski & Foster (not that Le Corbusier, we should point out), who were much in demand as church designers, though this is the only one of their designs old Pa Pitt has found in Pittsburgh so far. By the time this church opened in 1928, the congregation was bilingual, with services in German and in English; so the new church was called Trinity Church.
Not hidden under a bushel.
The parsonage was designed by the same architects and built at the same time as the church.
Peabody & Stearns were a Boston firm that kept a branch office in Pittsburgh to handle the many jobs they picked up in this city. They were responsible for rebuilding the Horne’s department store, and they designed the Liberty Market, later Motor Square Garden. But they also had a thriving business in Tudor mansions for the well-to-do in Pittsburgh’s East End. This one was built in 1902.
This picture from The Brickbuilder shows the house newly built. We can see that, except for filling in the side porch, very little has been done to change the house. Even the original diamond-paned upper sashes, or identical replacements, are still in the windows, and the windows in the sunroom that was made from the porch were matched to the rest of the windows in the house.
The gables were treated in a dark color scheme; the pastel blue of the current paint, along with the lacy wood trim, gives them a more feminine look than they would have had originally.
Linden Avenue in Point Breeze filled up fairly slowly from the 1880s on, and it has always been a desirable neighborhood, so it is a museum of good domestic architecture from many different eras. The wide variety of houses makes it a very pleasant street for an afternoon stroll. We have already seen the Frank Alden house and the Joseph Langfitt mansion; here are some more Linden Avenue houses from the 1880s to the 1930s.
In 1924, the Vatican made a separate exarchate, or mission diocese, for Ruthenian Catholics in the United States. Rome imagined it as based in New York, but there were few Ruthenians in New York. The largest concentration of them was in Pittsburgh, and the congregation of the Church of St. John the Baptist in Munhall (which you see in the background here) offered land and resources to the new bishop, Basil Takach (also spelled Wassil Takacs), which he accepted. So St. John the Baptist became a cathedral—thus making the extravagantly eccentric Titus de Bobula a cathedral architect retroactively, giving him one more thing to boast about when circumstances required him to boast.
More to the point, it meant that Munhall suddenly had a bishop, who had to be stored somewhere, and an entire diocesan administration. Adam Wickerham of Homestead, whose office was a short walk from here, was hired to design this eminently respectable-looking palace, which he did in a very Western style.1 The gables originally had Tudor half-timbering, which has been covered over with siding; but otherwise the building has not changed much from Wickerham’s original design.
The exarchate of Pittsburgh became an eparchy in 1963 and an archeparchy in 1969, so that the Byzantine Rite Archeparch (or Archbishop) of Pittsburgh outranks the Latin Rite Bishop of Pittsburgh.
There are many bishops in Pittsburgh from many different rites and denominations, but this may be the only purpose-built bishop’s palace in the area.
