The gatehouse for the Mount Lebanon Cemetery is a well-preserved vernacular-Gothic frame house. Not all the details have survived—the ugly front door is certainly not original—but more of the original decoration is preserved than we usually see on houses of this type in our area.
An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.
This has the look of a “hotel” in the Pittsburgh sense: a bar with rooms upstairs, thus qualifying for the much more readily available hotel liquor license. It still has a bar on the ground floor. The style is what old Pa Pitt calls “South Hills German Victorian,” and indeed a glance at the plat maps shows that this part of the Slopes was thoroughly German when this building went up shortly before 1910. The whole triangle bounded by South 18th Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Street (now Monastery Avenue) was owned by Elizabeth Lenert.
When your building has an acute angle, but not sharply acute, one way of dealing with it is to put the entrance there and make the corner into a feature rather than something that looks like an unfortunate necessity. The rocket-shaped turret on this building acts like a hinge to make it feel as though the building was meant to fold into this shape.
Otherwise, this is not an elaborate building, but the clever arrangement of bricks at the top of the 18th Street side makes an attractive cornice that doesn’t fall down.
We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.
The building would have had a much more dignified and balanced appearance before the ground-floor storefront was filled in; but since a corner bar is close in spirit to a men’s club, patrons should be grateful that it has windows at all.
On Liberty Avenue downtown.
The corner of Penn Avenue and Ninth Street. The building on the corner is the Wm. O. Johnston & Co. building, built for a printer who was one of the successors to the venerable Zadok Cramer of the Franklin Head Bookstore. We also have a composite picture of the front of the building.
Western Avenue in Allegheny West is an eclectic mix of buildings, from grand mansions to humble rowhouses to Art Deco storefronts. Here are some of the buildings on the southern side of the street, photographed late in the day when the sun was glancing across them.
This house, now the Parador Inn, was one of the fine houses put back in top shape by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson. It has a detailed history at the Allegheny West site.
Columbus Avenue is at the ragged back end of Manchester, where there are still many crumbling and abandoned buildings. This one, however, has been beautifully restored; it is the home of a marketing company that obviously sees the value in having a landmark building for its headquarters.
The part of Dutchtown south of East Ohio Street is a tiny but densely packed treasury of Victorian styles. Old Pa Pitt took a walk on Avery Street the other evening, when the sun had moved far enough around in the sky to paint the houses on the southeast side of the street.
Is this the most beautiful breezeway in Pittsburgh? It’s certainly in the running.
