Father Pitt

Tag: Victorian Architecture

  • Victorian Remnant on Smithfield Street

    633 Smithfield Street

    Americans don’t look up. That is the best explanation old Pa Pitt can come up with. It accounts for a number of phenomena: our blank, undecorated ceilings, or even worse our acoustical-tile ceilings; the disappearance of cornices and the healing of the scars thus left with the aluminum equivalent of duct tape; and the way builders and even architects renovate lower floors of a building without even a glance at what the remainder above looks like. Here we have a bedraggled building from 1883 that could be splendid if it were restored, or just renovated with some minimal taste. But what shall we even call that shingly excrescence on the lower two floors? We also note that all the upper windows are gone except on the third floor, where someone has installed a stock glass sliding door. “I’m just stepping out for a breath of fresh air,” says the visitor…

    The Brutalist spiral next door would have been a striking feature in a block of modernist buildings; it seems like, and probably was, a deliberate insult here.

    Top of the building qith 1883 date stone
    Ornamental woodcarving

  • Victorian Eclectic on Carson Street, South Side

    1710 East Carson Street

    This grand building from the 1880s towers over its lowlier neighbor with a Potemkin attic that has nothing behind it. The next generation of architects would cringe at the fussiness of the details, but they are harmonized well.

    Roof decoration

    Old maps show this building as owned by Mrs. M. A. Fuchs in 1890, and still owned by her in 1923.

  • Renovating the Triangle Building

    Triangle Building

    The Triangle Building, originally called the McCance Block, is currently under renovation for luxury apartments. It fills what may be one of the smallest downtown city blocks in the country, so that every side of a relatively small building faces the street.

  • Pair of Victorian Commercial Buildings on Carson Street, South Side

    Update: A kind correspondent corrects us: these are postmodern Victorian buildings designed by Gunther J. Kaier Architects, which earned the company that built them an award for fitting them so neatly into the streetscape. Father Pitt keeps the original text of the article below to point out how delightful it is to be wrong sometimes.

    These two Italianate buildings are alike in their decorative detailing, and at first glance we might take them for identical twins (discounting the altered ground floors). The one on the right, however, is wider by a small but significant amount. They were built in the 1880s, to judge by old maps, and they appear to have been separately owned from the beginning. The one on the left belonged to S. Bornshire in 1890, and still belonged to S. Bornshire thirty-three years later in 1923.

  • Morningside Public School

    Morningside Public School

    Edward J. Carlisle was the architect of this school, built in 1897 in a very Victorian Gothic style.

    Inscription: “Morningside Public School”
    Perspective view
    With attached buildings

    The building is preserved because it has been worked into a senior citizens’ home.

  • The Old Horne’s

    The original Horne’s

    Not the one with the Christmas tree, but the one before that. Horne’s was Pittsburgh’s first department store, and in 1880 the already-well-established Joseph Horne Company built this grand mercantile palace. It was Horne’s for only about seventeen years: in 1897, the department store moved to its much larger location at Penn Avenue and Stanwix Street, where it would stay for almost a century. After that, the Pittsburgh Post moved into this building, and later the Sun as well, when they were under the same ownership.

    1880 date stone

    The Wikipedia article on the Joseph Horne Company is a mess, and old Pa Pitt ought to work on rewriting it, except that it would require extensive research. Among other things, it tells us (without citing a source) that this building was built in 1881 (which may be when it opened) and was designed by Charles Tattersall Ingham, who would have been four years old when he designed it. Decent work for a four-year-old. However…

    1902 date stone

    The lower floors got a complete makeover in 1920, when the building was a newspaper headquarters, and that part of the building is in the trademark Ingham & Boyd style: rigorously symmetrical, with meticulously correct classical detailing. Charles Tattersall Ingham would have been 44 years old then, right in the middle of a prosperous career. Old Pa Pitt will therefore tentatively attribute that 1920 remodeling to Ingham & Boyd.

    Left entrance

    Do you have plans for a luxury-apartment project downtown? Here is your opportunity. Everyone else is doing it.

    Joseph Horne Company 1880 building

  • Duplex on Highland Avenue, Shadyside

    The two sides of this duplex, which probably dates from the 1870s or 1880s, have gone their separate ways, but the whole building is well preserved. The demolition of a badly mutilated house next door gives us a chance to appreciate some of the details on the side of the house.

    This rear view shows us a very inartistic addition to the third floor of one side, which is fortunately invisible from the front.

  • A Riot of Victorian Detail

    Commercial building at 1805 East Carson Street

    We’ve seen this exuberantly Victorian building on Carson Street before. It is one of the few relatively unmutilated survivors of the style that was common for commercial buildings in the 1870s and 1880s, so old Pa Pitt got out a long lens to appreciate some of the details.

    Top of the building
    Finial
    A different finial
    Carved ornament
    Two carved ornaments
    Pilaster
    Angular ornamebt

  • The Witches’ Caps on Negley Avenue

    625 to 633 South Negley Avenue

    This row of Queen Anne houses on Negley Avenue in Shadyside surely strikes every passer-by, if for nothing other than their turrets with witches’ caps. The other details are also worth noticing: the ornamental woodwork and the roof slates, for example. The houses are just detached enough that we can see that the sides are made of cheaper brick rather than the stone that faces the street.

    629 South Negley Avenue

    The last one in the row lost its cap many years ago, but in compensation has been ultra-Victorianized with extra polychrome woodwork, as we see on the dormer below.

    Dormer

  • Homestead Municipal Building

    Homestead municipal building

    It would be interesting to know who was the architect of this eclectic pile, and whether he was the nephew of the burgess. It might have been more attractive before the bricks and stone accents were painted the drabbest possible grey, but it was probably never a beautiful building. It has, however, grown some character with age, and old Pa Pitt is pleased that it has been fairly well preserved, except for the installation of some standard-size windows and doors in holes that are too big for them.

    Inscription

    This stonework reminds Father Pitt of Titus de Bobula.

    From down the hill