There has been an A. M. E. church on this site for a long time: a frame church appears on an 1891 map of Homestead. This modest but rich little Tudor Gothic building, with its matching parsonage, dates from 1920, and faces a pleasant park on a pleasant street. It fits well with its neighbors, not overwhelming them but still announcing itself as a church.
A Tudor Gothic building that fits well with Old Main and the chapel across the street. The cornerstone was laid in 1922 by Archbishop Canevin himself (Pittsburgh was not an archdiocese, but Canevin was titular Archbishop of Pelusium).
Like many Pittsburgh buildings, Canevin Hall has more than one ground floor.
This modest Tudor Gothic church, probably built in the 1890s, is another one to add to our collection of churches with the sanctuary upstairs. It is now the Bethesda Temple.
The parsonage is in an extraordinarily rich and accurate Tudor style for such a small house. Compare the details to this medieval house in Canterbury.
Addendum: It appears from the Inland Architect and News Record for July, 1900, that the architect of the house was the extraordinary John T. Comès, working for Beezer Brothers. The design was featured in the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s exhibition that year:
Mr. John T. Comes renders an admirable Pastor’s Residence for “First Brethren Church,” by Beezer Brothers, which leans hard to an old church and breaks away from the sidewalk in a most happy manner, winding up the stone stairs to a reserved and “strong door.” The drawing itself is a happy one. The pots on the chimney are swelling beyond redemption.
In the magazine Architecture we find the sketch our critic was describing:
The chimney pots (were they really beyond redemption?) are gone, and the porch is a later replacement. But Comès’ design is still striking.
One of several mansions that have become part of Chatham University, this tasteful Tudor house is comparatively modest against its neighbors the Mellons and the Reas.
Addendum: We find from the June 1911 issue of The Builder that this was built as the President’s Home for the Pennsylvania College for Women. The architect was Thomas Hannah. Here are two pictures from the magazine:
Two varieties of Tudor house. They have very similar center-hall plans, but the one above emphasizes extravagant and almost cartoonish woodwork, whereas the one below is much more restrained. Old Pa Pitt would have guessed that the second one was later, but the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site tells us that both were built at about the same time, not long before 1910 (between the “1903–1906” layer and the “1910” layer). It would be interesting to know the name of the somewhat eccentric architect who designed the one above.
A big house or small mansion in a particularly lush Tudor style. The woodwork is decorated with unusual care.
The imposing Tudor or Jacobean Gothic front of this church is its most impressive feature, with twin towers that make the church seem bigger than it is. The large stained-glass window in the center seems a little undersized for the building, leaving an awkward blank space above it; but that is a minor quibble, and this is a fine building kept in good shape by its congregation.
Father Pitt promised more Tudor-style houses in Schenley Farms, and here they are. We are certainly not finished with the Tudor houses in the neighborhood, but we have made a good beginning.
The Tudor style was very popular for large houses in Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, and in Schenley Farms, that exceptional enclave of exceptionally fine houses in the Oakland medical-intellectual district, it is the single most popular style. The hallmark of the style is half-timbering: exposed wooden beams with stucco (or some such material) between them. Here is a random selection of Tudor houses; we’ll see more of them shortly, since, with the leaves gone for the winter, now is the time to get pictures of the houses behind the trees.
This last house is an interesting example of the survival of the style into the middle twentieth century: it is later than most of its neighbors, and probably dates from the 1930s at the earliest, but it adapts the Tudor style to a lower budget and more modest size.
This fine building, put up in 1912, is well preserved but unused, and we hope it can be kept in good shape. It sits in the Perry Hilltop part of Lafayette Hilltop—“Perry South” on city planning maps. It was designed by Chancey or Chauncey W. Hodgdon (we have found the name spelled both ways), in an interesting combination of styles—round arches for the smaller windows, broad Gothic arches for the large windows, and a Tudor Gothic arcade in the front; except that the arches are more rounded than usual Tudor arches. Perhaps an architectural historian can nail down the style precisely, or perhaps it is simply unique to Hodgdon.
The Allegheny City Society has a substantial article about this church in the spring 2017 issue of the society newsletter (PDF).
