A well-preserved cast-iron front, though the building has lost its hat. Father Pitt would probably paint it a different color.
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Cast-Iron Front on Wood Street
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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More of Victorian Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield
More of the Victorian business district of Bloomfield, from the age when it was a very German neighborhood. We begin with a building we have seen before, which has just finished a renovation and is ready for another century and a quarter of use. The tall third floor, as old Pa Pitt remarked before, looks like an assembly room of some sort.
The rest of these buildings all date from the 1890s.
The date stone gives us the date 1890 and the name of the owner, P. Biedenbach.
Two of a row of modest houses with storefronts put up in the 1890s.
A building that preserves its corner entrance, though not the original treatment of it.
Elaborate brickwork distinguishes this building from its neighbors.
Olympus E-20N. Another small storefront with living quarters above.
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Husler Building, Carnegie
Samuel T. McClarren, a very successful Victorian architect and a resident of nearby Thornburg, designed this landmark building, which was put up in 1896.
A small alteration to the front gives us an example of how important the little details are to the appearance of a building. The arched windows in the top floor have been shortened, as we can see by the slightly different shade of brick where they have been filled in. The original design would have created a single broad stripe from the arches at the top to the storefront below. Interrupting that composition makes the building look awkward and top-heavy. The ground floor has also been altered in a way that obscures the vigor of the design. Once we have said that, however, we should acknowledge that the building is generally in a good state of preservation and praise the Historical Society of Carnegie for keeping it up.
This building has a very difficult lot to deal with, and the architect must have found it an interesting challenge. First, the lot is a triangle. A kind of turret blunts the odd angle on the Main Street end and turns it from a bug into a feature.
The second challenge is that one long side of the lot is smack up against Chartiers Creek, a minor river that is placid most of the time but can be a raging torrent when storms make it angry. The foundations would have had to take all the moods of the river into account, and the fact that the building has stood through disastrous floods suggests that Mr. McClarren knew what he was up to.
A view from across Chartiers Creek shows us the sharp point of the triangle in the rear.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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Kissner Building, Dutchtown
A storefront with living quarters upstairs in a slightly prickly Victorian style. The upraised arm on the corner makes it look as though the building is trying to hail a streetcar.
The inscription has been obliterated, which is not playing fair. But the building appears on a 1901 plat map as belonging to someone named Kissner; it was probably built in the 1890s.
Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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Lutz’s Meat Market, Hill District
You can read the history of Lutz’s Meat Market at the Hill District Digital History site, where you’ll also see a picture by Teenie Harris, who, as usual, snapped the shutter at exactly the moment that captured everyone in the scene in the most characteristic pose.
The building has been beautifully restored, including the elaborate woodwork of the cornice and storefront.
Nikon COOLPIX P100. These corner entrances are often filled in, so it makes old Pa Pitt happy to see this one preserved and carefully restored.
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A Few Houses on Perrysville Avenue, Perry Hilltop
Perrysville Avenue started as a plank road, with tollgates, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it began to fill up as the spine of a pleasant suburban neighborhood of Allegheny. Today Perry Hilltop is a strange mixture of appalling decay and beautiful restoration: it has never quite got off the ground as a trendy neighborhood, but some of the houses have been beautifully preserved. The splendid Dutch Colonial mansion above, for example, is in very good shape. Note the original windows. It was probably built around the turn of the twentieth century.
A Victorian frame house that preserves some of its original details, including the trim around the windows. It appears on an 1882 plat map, so it probably dates from the 1870s.
This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.
This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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B. F. Jones Building
Built in 1881, this is the only remaining downtown work of Joseph Stillburg—as far as old Pa Pitt knows, but he still hopes for surprises. Stillburg was a very big deal in Pittsburgh in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, but most of his buildings have disappeared. They were prominent buildings in their time—the Pittsburgh Exposition buildings, for example, and the Bissell Block—but they were replaced by other even grander projects as the land they were built on became even more valuable (or, in the case of the Exposition buildings, they were taken down for Point Park).
This building is a symphonic fugue of perfectly balanced themes and rhythms woven into a composition that must have been strikingly modern in 1881. It has been restored and renovated with good taste, and it is ready for another century and a half of use.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Three Buildings from the 1880s on Shiloh Street, Mount Washington
Some day some clever inventor will patent a way to match mortar colors in brickwork and make a fortune. (That was sarcasm, by the way: it can be done, but first you have to realize that it ought to be done.) Nevertheless, this building looks much better than it did a few years ago, when the front was covered with aluminum, fake stone, and asphalt shingles. Was it absolutely necessary to brick in all the side windows? Well, probably. Otherwise light might leak in. The original building comes from the 1880s, and the basic outline of it remains Victorian Gothic.
This building also seems to have been put up in the 1880s, or possibly as early as the 1870s. It has been so thoroughly remodeled so often that it would be hard to guess what it looked like originally; Father Pitt’s best guess would be that it had a Second Empire mansard roof and details, replaced in the 1970s by the parody of a Second Empire roof we see today. In the past two decades, the ground floor has been completely redesigned twice; the current incarnation is better than the way it looked twenty years ago.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Here is a Second Empire building that retains much of its original detail, in spite of the complete remodeling of the ground floor (the original design probably let in far too much natural light) and the artificial siding on the dormers.
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Folk Art in a Gable in Beltzhoover
Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.1 The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.
Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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The Late Shady Avenue Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Exactly two years ago today, Father Pitt paid a visit to this unique church, one of the most imaginative works of architect Thomas Cox McKee. At the time, he had no idea the church would be demolished a few months later, or he would have documented it more carefully. Looking back on the pictures he published then, old Pa Pitt decided they were lousy, not to mince words. As a memorial to the vanished building, he decided to go back to the original images and see if he could make better pictures out of them. Two years from now, Father Pitt will look back at these pictures and think they were lousy and he could do better, but the delight of a life of constant learning is seeing incremental improvement.
To put the pictures in context, we reprint the text of the article we published two years ago:
Now known as Shady Avenue Christian Assembly, after having spent many years as Shady Avenue Presbyterian Church (without the “Cumberland”).
Just down the street from the huge and spectacular Calvary Episcopal and Sacred Heart Catholic churches, each the size of many a cathedral, this 1889 church is likely to pass unnoticed. Once you do notice it, though, you will not stop noticing it. It is a bravura performance in a sort of Queen Anne Romanesque style by a Victorian architect who was about 22 years old at the time, and who was not afraid to pull out all the stops and stomp on the pedals for all he was worth. An entire issue of the East Ender, the East End Historical Society’s newsletter, was devoted to the architect, T. C. McKee (PDF), and we take all our information from Justin P. Greenawalt with profound gratitude for his research.
Thomas Cox McKee (usually known as T. C. McKee) was apprenticed to architect James W. Drum. But in 1886, when young McKee was still only 20, his master was run over by a freight train. Instead of looking for another apprentice position, McKee went out on his own and seems to have been successful right away. He later built a comfortable practice designing homes for the wealthy and small to medium-sized commercial buildings, along with at least one prominent school (the Belmar School in Homewood, still standing). Then, in 1910, he threw it all away and went to Cleveland, where he took odd jobs until he settled down as a designer of soda fountains. No one seems to know what happened, although Mr. Greenawalt’s article hints that it might have had something to do with McKee’s constitutional extravagance.
That extravagance comes through in every detail of this building. In the age of modernism, this sort of thing was dismissed as a bunch of Victorian noise, but the masses are balanced to form interesting compositions from every angle.
The much more conventional 1911 addition (although even it is a little bit fantastical) was designed by Rodgers & Minnis. Below we see it across the pile of dirt that used to be Shady Hill Center until the property became too valuable to host a suburban-style strip mall.
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