Category Archive: Architecture & Architects
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Preservationists see window of opportunity
Tuesday, August 28, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
On a beautiful, blue sky Saturday morning, when Pittsburghers are out golfing, gardening, goofing off and otherwise enjoying the day, architect Terry Necciai and crew are holed up on the dark, grimy second floor of a Downtown building, wrestling with some crusty old windows.
Standing on a ladder overlooking Liberty Avenue, Necciai is trying to rig one of the rope and pulley systems that help open and close the century-old, double-hung windows.
“Nothing got through the pulley hole,” Necciai says to Daniel Steinitz, one of four volunteers from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz business school, who’s deftly straddling an open staircase next to the windows. “The second rope won’t even go through.”
It looks like hard, hazardous work.
“It’s easy craftsmanship,” Necciai said. “It’s really basic.”
To make a point, this is how Necciai has been spending his Saturdays for the better part of the past two months. The point is this: With a little money, paint and elbow grease, you can make a big difference.
A former Main Street program manager in Charleroi and Somerset who championed that incremental, preservation-minded approach for Downtown in the recent Fifth/Forbes debate, Necciai is joined most Saturdays by Sandy Brown and a changing handful of others. Brown is president, Necciai vice president, of Preservation Pittsburgh, and this is one of the group’s volunteer projects.
About 18 volunteers — most of them people in their 20s — have worked with Necciai and Brown. Together, they have removed seven window sashes from their frames, scraped the multicolored paint from the wood, stripped the paint that covered the glass and rehung the sashes in their frames.
It would have been easier to replace the glass than to strip it, but the volunteers value the irregular appearance and imperfections of 19th-century “wavy glass.”
They also value the satisfaction that comes from actually doing something, as opposed to merely talking about doing something.
“We put on gloves and old clothes and a couple of hours go by and we have some fun chatting,” Brown said. “You’re not just sitting around in a meeting.”
Built in the late 19th century, the building spans Liberty Avenue and Market Street and is situated on one of those little triangles of land formed by the intersection of Downtown’s two grids. It’s owned by the family of George Harris, who runs the florist shop next door, and occupied by Jim Calato’s City Deli.
Sometime in the 1970s, the building’s second floor became an advertising sign for the flower shop. That’s when the windows — glass and all — were painted over, then later painted over again in white.
In reviving historic structures, “I think what’s best for the small buildings is to do things, in many cases, that are less expensive than what you would expect because it does less damage to the building,” Necciai said. “I was trying to find a building to show the principle that it’s not necessarily more expensive” to rejuvenate the original architecture than to remodel it.
Why this building? For one thing, the improvement would be obvious and dramatic, yielding a big bang for the buck.
For another, “It’s all traditional materials” — wood and glass. “It’s only two stories tall and manageable. The facade is 80 percent glass and almost all the wood is reachable from inside the building.”
Each of the 11 window panes that have been stripped, scraped and sanded took about eight hours. Next, the volunteers will finish replacing the ropes in three windows and paint all of the windows’ exteriors.
“We’ve got a nice, three-value olive green going toward ochre,” Brown said. “We’re picking up some of the detail in deep red.”
What the volunteers can’t paint, professional sign painters should be able to reach, if new City Deli signs are commissioned.
At a table in front of the building, drawings show how the building would look with a storefront and signs more in character with its historic upper floor. Harris is considering that. He’s paid for all the supplies so far (about $400 worth), and he’s thrilled with the work — and the workers.
“I’m very much impressed with their zeal and desire,” he said. “They are really sacrificing themselves, believing that improvements can be made and renovations brought about in ways other than mass destruction. It’s really an extension of what we professed all through the battle of Fifth and Forbes. And they’re doing it with smiles on their faces. It’s a real delight to me.”
For Necciai, part of the value of this project “is giving young, committed people a small piece of the action pie, getting them into the buildings and showing them how repairable they are.”
Nina Thomson, a Pitt architectural studies student who met Necciai when she wrote to him in February 2000, asking how she could help save buildings in the Fifth-Forbes corridor, did the drawings when she worked for him last summer. This summer, she’s devoted three Saturdays to the project and said she’s “learned a lot about how the old kind of windows work. I wish there were more things going on like that.”
Certainly there’s no lack of historic buildings along Fifth and Forbes that could use such TLC. And while more and more of them have empty storefronts, some snail-pace progress is being made on the Plan C front, as about eight members of the committee — including representatives of the mayor’s office and its former chief opponent, Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation — make plans to meet with potential developers in Philadelphia next month. (They’ll also be interviewing other local and out-of-town developers, of course.) Committee members — some of them volunteers — are paying their own ways.
Resurrecting Fifth and Forbes, like reviving the City Deli building, is proving to be slow, but democratic, work.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Thornburg’s Own: Exploring the charm, history of the Craftsman-style home built for the community’s founder
Saturday, August 25, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
With its great sandstone porches and deeply overhanging eaves that seem almost to touch the ground, the Frank Thornburg house feels as rooted in its landscape as the native trees and perennials that surround it.
On a pleasantly cool summer morning, with breezes gently wafting through the porches, it seems a bit like the house is just an excuse to hold up these rugged, expansive picnic pavilions — empty now but echoing in the imagination with the music, conversation and child’s play of almost a century of living.
“It was a great place to roller skate,” said Gretchen Haller, whose parents bought the 18-room house in 1944. There they raised two daughters who have decided that, after 57 years, it’s time to sell the house Frank Thornburg built in 1907.
The 4 1/2 acres of hillside on which the house now sits once was part of “Drummondsfield,” a 402-acre tract the state deeded to Margaret Drummond in 1785. Thomas Thornburg purchased the land in 1806, and in 1899, two of his great-great-grandsons, cousins Frank and David Thornburg, formed the Thornburg Land Co. to develop 250 acres into “a high-class residence district,” as they advertised in the Chartiers Valley Mirror.
Houses had to be brick or stone for at least the first story and cost not less than $2,500. Likely by late 1900, the first five houses had been built along Princeton Road, in a modest Queen Anne style. One was for Frank Thornburg, a handsome man with a full mustache who ran his real estate venture from an office in the Park Building, Downtown.
By about 1903, Thornburg was living in his second house, an odd duck of a building with a crenellated tower — one that would look right at home on a Queen Anne house — popping out of the side of a stone-and-shingle, Craftsman-style house.
His third house, with seven bedrooms and 10 fireplaces, was and still is the largest house in Thornburg, but one so simpatico with its site that, from almost any vantage point, it seems little more than a rambling, cozy bungalow.
The V-shaped house is anchored to the hillside by its sandstone blocks, joined together by Italian stone masons with a dark, gritty mortar that, Haller said, also came from Italy. It makes a prominent pattern against the light-colored stones, bringing out the handmade, rustic character of the exterior.
“It’s really the ultimate Western Pennsylvania Craftsman house,” said Albert Tannler, historical collections director at Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, who has been researching and writing about houses in Thornburg since 1992.
If anyone had an educated guess as to why Frank Thornburg built three houses in the space of seven years, it would be Tannler.
“I think his knowledge grows apace,” he said. “His taste becomes more sophisticated as time goes on.”
Every winter, Thornburg took his family to California to visit his mother, who lived in Los Angeles. He’d return with photographs of Craftsman and Mission-style houses to uses as models for Thornburg houses, interpreted and adapted by his cousin, architect Samuel Thornburg McClarren.
McClarren, who earlier had designed Woolslair and John Morrow elementary schools in Pittsburgh, is known to have been the architect of six houses in Thornburg, including two for himself; Tannler expects he’ll be able to identify others.
In a letter to Alice Crist Christner (author of “Here’s to Thornburg,” a community history published in 1966), Frank Thornburg’s daughter Florence wrote that their second home was inspired by one in California, but made no mention of any West Coast influence on the third home.
“It isn’t a very California house,” Tannler said. “It’s a perfect house for this climate — all that stone, all that shingle.”
Although he hasn’t found a source yet, he suspects there may be a California house that inspired the third Frank Thornburg house’s most singular, dramatic element: the central, two-story brick chimney that greets the visitor upon opening the heavy oak front door. In winter, with a blazing fire in its belly, it must be a warm and welcoming sight.
The entrance hall, with a low, beamed ceiling just inside the door, suddenly opens up to accommodate the soaring chimney and the stairs that wrap around it, leading to the second floor. Coupled with wide openings to the flanking dining and living rooms, it has the effect of turning a mere foyer into a great hall.
A left turn from the center hall of the Thornburg house leads to the living room, 21 by 26 feet, with a stone fireplace flanked by built-in cabinets with leaded-glass fronts. At the far end, a door leads onto the largest of the two open porches, 12 by 36 feet, which overlooks chokecherries, lilacs and an ancient sprawling oak (known to be more than 250 years old). It feels a bit like sitting in a treehouse.
To the right of the hall is the 16- by-21-foot dining room, with access to the knotty pine kitchen, located just behind the center-hall chimney. The kitchen, installed by the Hallers in the 1950s, was designed by their friend, architect and songwriter Robert Schmertz. Small and cozy, this low-ceilinged room has a window-wall view into the hillside rock garden.
Gretchen Haller’s father, Fred Haller, studied architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) with Schmertz. Haller had to leave school when his father died to take over the family business, the Mt. Lebanon Garage Co., but the two remained close, lifelong friends.
During the Depression, as many as five families lived in the house, which still has what could be a separate, first-floor apartment, with the house’s original (but remodeled) kitchen, just beyond the dining room.
Josiah and Lillie Stevenson owned the house for much of the 1920s and 1930s. Their son, John, married Livonia Osborn, who in 1926 became the first female to graduate from Carnegie Tech’s architecture department.
Livonia brought her friend and fellow Carnegie Tech student, artist Joe Huot, to see the house. In Thornburg, “he thought he was in paradise,” said his daughter, Sylvia Huot Wyatt. A year later, in 1932, he moved his family into one of the Stevensons’ apartments. Wyatt has a rocking chair given to her by Josiah Stevenson, who told her it had been used by William Jennings Bryan during a visit to his house.
Upstairs in the Frank Thornburg house, oral tradition has it that a sleeping porch off one of the bedrooms was used by Bryan, the lawyer, perennial presidential candidate and evangelist who died in 1925, just a few days after arguing against the teaching of evolution in the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”
While many have savored the charms of Frank Thornburg’s house, its builder didn’t enjoy it for long. In 1909, the Thornburg Land Co. declared bankruptcy, and by 1912, Tannler reports, Frank Thornburg was living in Los Angeles, where he died 15 years later.
But during the Hallers’ tenure, his house often was alive with music. In the late 1940s or early ’50s, pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn, who worked at Rakuen Lakes, a local amusement park owned by Haller’s great-aunt, visited and played in their living room.
Benny Benack and Jack Purcell also brought their bands to the great side porch, playing old standards while the Hallers and their friends from the Fellows Club danced the night away above the darkening silhouette of the majestic oak, perfectly framed within a pair of sandstone pillars.
For information about the Frank Thornburg house, which is being offered for $750,000, call Gretchen Haller at (412) 276-4006.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Bright-hued bridges? Reaction to idea spans full spectrum of views
Friday, June 15, 2001
By Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Arthur Ziegler and his staff have been discussing colorful bridges for a couple of years. Now, may the public debate begin.
The president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation has suggested that bridges be painted a variety of vibrant colors when they come due for a new paint job. These include most bridges that line the Allegheny River, a few along the Monongahela and, most immediately the Fort Pitt — due for a new coat of paint in 2003.
The new colors bring to mind the hues of overpriced polo shirts in catalogs — candied yam, purple ice, grassy meadow and perfect peach among them — and at least one aesthetically-minded cultural leader is horrified.
Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum, said, “Why doesn’t he go and work for IKEA?” Bridges, he said, “are not bath towels.”
Architect Syl Damianos, who sits on the advisory committee for redesign of the Carnegie Science Center, says he likes the idea “a lot. There’s no reason they need to be dull, drab structures.”
While no one is defending the current “Aztec gold” of some Downtown bridges, Allegheny County public works Director Tom Donatelli has said he believes the color should be consistent. Faded to the color that Maxwell King of the Heinz Endowments calls “old dead bananas,” the original color has been called the city’s “signature color,” in citations of sports teams’ uniforms and an old redevelopment moniker, the Golden Triangle.
The Federal Highway Administration paid the bulk of $7 million spent for local bridge painting in 1994. A paint job lasts about 15 years. The state Department of Transportation and the county own the bridges and would have to approve any color changes.
Coinciding with talk of color are plans for bridge lighting. The Riverlife Task Force has targeted three of the bridges — the Roberto Clemente, 7th and 9th Street bridges, three uniform spans side by side on the Allegheny — for a demo-lighting project.
Davitt Woodwell, executive director of the Riverlife Task Force, calls Ziegler’s suggestion “an interesting idea. There are a lot of interesting ideas. Look at places like Cleveland,” where bridges are being painted and lit, he said. Whatever is done, he said, will indicate “how the city wants to present itself to the world. The more discussion the better.”
King, executive director of the Heinz Endowments and co-chair of the Riverlife Task Force, weighs in against color variety. “With all due respect for Arthur, I think he’s dead wrong. The right thing to do is paint them all one color. That becomes a signature look.”
King says he “wouldn’t touch” the Smithfield Street Bridge, but chooses for all the others a vibrant yellow, and lighting.
“Every visitor would come away with the impression we want them to — that rivers and bridges are defining of our life here. All different colors would achieve the opposite.”
Director of operations and marketing for History & Landmarks, admitted the colors the foundation has discussed can look “a little bouncy” on the computer-generated images. “But I don’t think any [purple] bridge would be a Barney purple.”
Sokolowski says the attitude that the Aztec gold is Pittsburgh’s signature color because it matches sports-team uniforms is “provincially simple-minded and second rate. These bridges are exemplars of the 19th -century industrial society. You could do a more creative thing with those bridges than colors, like recognizing the artistic integrity of the period they were made in, then maybe commission an artist to do something that would distinguish it, like with lighting.”
He said the colors that come to mind with the names such as “purple ice” sound like “tawdry nail polish.”
We don’t want our bridges to look like whores.”
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Implosion of Three Rivers Stadium
PHLF News
February 11, 2001Implosion of Three Rivers Stadium taken from the roof of the Lawrence Paint Building (now gone) at Station Square, Pittsburgh.
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Architectural historian reveals home styles at Old House Fair
Saturday, February 10, 2001
By Kevin Kirkland, Post-Gazette Homes Editor
At the Old House Fair, hundreds of contractors, vendors and old house lovers find each other each year at Victoria Hall, a beautifully restored house/social hall in Bloomfield.
Old house owners (or wannabes) check out products and services, talk with experts and search for the secrets to restoring or maintaining an old house.
A few hundred will be there Feb. 24 for the sixth annual event. And as usual, a few dozen will line up for one popular program, “What Style Is My House?” led by Walter Kidney, architectural historian for the show’s sponsor, the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
One by one, Kidney looks at their photos and tells them what a home’s architecture says about the style and period in which it was built. Sometimes, it doesn’t say much.
“Many of the houses couldn’t be given a style label. With additions and alterations, they may have features of several styles. A house may be good in its proportions but not have many details,” Kidney says.
Some homeowners go away disappointed, but others are happy to know a little bit more about where their house fits into the varied broth of periods and styles that make up Pittsburgh’s housing stock.
Kidney, author of “Landmark Architecture: Pittsburgh and Allegheny County,” says Western Pennsylvania is best known architecturally for its bridges, churches and schools and other public buildings. Its residential construction, with the obvious exception of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and a few others, is not as old or of as consistently high quality as a city like Philadelphia.
“In Philadelphia, ordinary houses sometimes have great beauty and distinction that you don’t find here,” Kidney says. “They have been building very good-looking houses since the 1700s.”
Western Pennsylvania does have a sprinkling of intact homes from the late 1700s and early to mid-1800s, most of which are described in Kidney’s landmark work. There are also clusters of Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne and other elaborate styles. But these weren’t built for ordinary Pittsburghers. And they’re rarely the ones that Kidney sees photos of at the Old House Fair.
Instead, he sees Colonial Revivals of every period, from the first batch around the time of our country’s centennial right up through the 1950s.
Some of the century-old structures are also Foursquares, a term popularized in the 1970s and ’80s by Delaware architectural historian Alan Gowans. It refers to tall boxy houses with four equal-sized rooms upstairs and down, and pyramidal or hipped roofs. Often built of brick here, they usually have a long front porch and at least one central dormer.
“Every North American town built before the 1930s has dozens, thousands of them, and the countryside is full of them as well,” Gowans wrote in his 1986 book, “The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890 – 1930.”
Foursquares line whole streets in Bloomfield and the South Side, but they don’t always wear Colonial details.
“It lends itself to being tarted up,” says Albert Tannler, historical collections director for History & Landmarks. Some have Italianate bracketing, Arts & Crafts elements or Tudor half-timbering.
Kidney sees much more than Foursquares at the Old House Fair. He also sees occasional Richardsonian Romanesque and other Victorian styles from the North Side, Tudors from Squirrel Hill and Mt. Lebanon and Chateauesque and Shingle-style mansions from Shadyside. For sheer variety of periods and styles and architectural quality, he and other historians say Woodland Road in Squirrel Hill is hard to beat.
The winding street has everything from the c. 1860 Gothic Revival Howe-Childs gatehouse
(now under restoration by Chatham College) to high-style brick Georgians and ornate Tudors from the early 1900s and ’20s, to 1950s Modern.
So, in the five years that Kidney has participated in the Old House Fair, has he ever made any big discoveries? Not really, but he remembers at least one house he wouldn’t mind seeing again — a c. 1905 home in Bellevue or one of the other Ohio River towns.
“It was by Marius Rosseau, I think. He designed the St. Francis de Sales [Roman Catholic] Church in McKees Rocks. It had some interesting structural features, like reinforced concrete. He may have done it for himself. I wish I had taken some notes on that one,” Kidney says.
Neither Kidney nor other area architectural historians know much more about Rosseau but would love to see the house. So if the homeowner’s still out there, bring your photos to the fair on Feb. 24. Kidney will be in the library from 1 to 3 p.m. He’s looking forward to seeing your old house.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Arts & Crafts movement leaves its mark in quiet western suburb of Pittsburgh
Saturday, January 20, 2001
By Bette McDevitt
Certain places are associated with the Craftsman movement in America: Syracuse, N.Y., where Gustav Stickley first made his Arts & Crafts-style furniture; Pasadena, Calif., where the Greene brothers created a softer, Asian-influenced version of what’s also called Mission style; and Chicago, where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style was born.
Thornburg doesn’t make that list, but for local lovers of Arts & Crafts, maybe it should.
The tiny borough west of Pittsburgh was an early suburb, founded in 1900 by two cousins,
Frank and Dave Thornburg. Heirs to the family farm, they and their Thornburg Land Development Co. laid out 200 lots on 250 acres of farmland in 1899. They first built five homes along Princeton Road, adding nearly 60 more in the next 20 years.
Frank Thornburg traveled to California frequently, apparently admiring the work of Charles and Henry Greene and others. He engaged his cousin, Samuel T. McClarren, to build homes like those he had seen. Though they built a few simplified Queen Anne-style homes, most are Arts & Crafts, constructed of field stone, brick, stucco and wood shingle. They’re not all perfect examples of the style, but they’re ours.
“Thornburg houses fascinate partly because they appear to be one step behind — but only one step behind — Gustav Stickley in upper New York, the Greene brothers in California and Frank Lloyd Wright as they were creating and defining an indigenous American residential architecture,” Albert Tannler, historical collections director for the Pittsburgh History and Landmark Foundations, has written.
To the residents of what is now called Lower Thornburg, the homes are as important for the community they create as their style.
“I could walk on every street here, and name every person in each house,” said Tom Mackin, sitting beside the fireplace in his comfortable living room.
Mackin and his wife, Eileen, both 45, have lived in Thornburg for 13 years, and raised their two sons, Tom Jr. and Michael here.
Their house was built in the California Mission style, with sand-colored stucco walls, dark red tile roof, a large overhang and curved porticoes across the front entrance.
Tom Mackin, who has a contracting business in Carnegie, and his wife, the clinical manger of the Wound Care Center at Ohio Valley General Hospital, have remodeled almost every room in the house, rewiring and plastering as they went. The home has four bedrooms, all with fireplaces, and a finished third floor where their sons roost.
The living room has typical Arts & Crafts features, including an Inglenook fireplace with built-in benches and bookcases. The dining room has a beamed ceiling, mahogany wainscoting and built-in buffet, all warmed by period sconces. A small “chauffeur’s room” off the kitchen, with a fireplace, window seat and chaise lounge, is the perfect hideaway for a nap.
Lower Thornburg was designated as a historic district in 1982. The Mackins, who have made major changes only in their kitchen, say residents accept the responsibility to keep the facades intact and retain the interiors as best they can.
Restoration-minded homeowners can get lots of cyber advice from Tom Stermitz, who is renovating his own 1915 Arts and Crafts bungalow in Denver and maintains a very informative Web site (http://www.ragtime.org/arch/Arch_Craft.html).
“The most common renovation mistake,” says Stermitz, “is for someone to think they have a Victorian house and proceed to polish or replace all the dark brass, add shiny brass lanterns to the doorway and a Victorian chandelier over the dining room table.”
Don’t paint the woodwork, he warns.
“The dark woodwork and the wide, overhanging eaves leave the interiors fairly dark by modern standards. But painting the woodwork will destroy the attraction to a real lover of the style and have a strong negative effect on the house value. One way to get past this psychological difficulty is to learn to appreciate ‘pools’ of light and to remember romantic candlelight dinners.”
Although Stermitz is in Denver, he could have been speaking of the Walther home, on Stanford Road. The house was built in 1903 for Albert Daschbach, the real estate salesman for the Thornburg Land Development Co. and was featured in House Beautiful in 1911 for its beauty, comfort and moderate price, $8,000.
The Daschbach family raised nine children in the house, and the Walthers, with daughter Victoria, are using every square foot. David Walther, 42, is manager of Izzy Miller’s Furniture in Carnegie. He’s also a collector.
“You name it and I collect it,” he said.
He caught the collecting bug when he and Donna managed house and estate sales. Now, he’s a regular at local flea markets.
“I always have another little spot for this or a niche for that,” he said.
His fondness for the old goes for houses, too.
“I don’t like people to bastardize old houses. If they want modern, then buy modern.”
The Walthers came to Thornburg from a similar but smaller house in Rosslyn Farms, which also has its share of Arts & Crafts-style homes. This house has some of the style’s standard features — the “sleeping porch” on the second floor; window seats by the fireplaces in the living room, dining room and bedrooms; built-in cabinetry; large pocket doors between rooms; and leaded glass in the front door.
Tom Walther keeps an eye on the real estate market and estimates that homes in Thornburg sell from $275,00 and up. There are some very large new homes at the top of the hill, which no doubt raise the ante.
The Schneider home on Hamilton Road is one of Thornburg’s classic Craftsman bungalows. Reflecting the movement’s reliance on native materials, the fieldstone on the first level was gathered from the nearby hillside. The second story is soft creme-colored shingles with deep red and blue trim.
Jeff , 47, and Laure, 43, Schneider moved here from California two years ago with their daughter, Caroline, 12, and son, Lew, 8. They were familiar with the Arts & Crafts style from homes built by Greene and Greene in the Pasadena area.
“We saw this ad in the paper, a long, detailed ad describing this Arts & Crafts house in Thornburg, and we didn’t even look any further,” said Laure.
The house had been restored by Gail and George Wasson of Washington County, who put in 4,000 hours of work but never lived in it.
“The neighbors tell me that Gail carried the fieldstone up from the hill and rebuilt the fireplace in our bedroom, stone by stone,” said Laure.
Like many homes in Thornburg, this is a center hall plan with a living room to the left, dining room to the right and a kitchen at the back of the house. A large gas fireplace warms the living room on a chilly morning.
The simple dark woodwork has been maintained throughout the house. Jeff’s black-and-white photography collection lines the walls of the living room. The only addition was a powder room off the center hall, done in earth-tone tile that is repeated in the kitchen and master bath.
The sleeping porch, now enclosed and used as a dining area by the Schneiders, was built into many Arts & Crafts homes. Amid a tuberculosis epidemic, health experts counseled sleeping quarters where fresh “healing” air circulated freely.
The Schneiders found both a house ready to move into and a community where they immediately felt at home. Jeff Schneider, who owns the Funny Bone comedy club in Station Square with his brother Keith, said, “This is the vortex of activity right here.”
Laure is heavily involved in children’s activities at the Community Club, founded in 1930. Every holiday is observed with a parade, a picnic or a celebration.
“If there are seven annual activities for children, there must be 20 for adults, including book groups and the oldest continuous theater group in the county, the Village Players. I have never lived in a community where there is so much involvement,” Laure said.
Lately, community involvement in Thornburg has extended beyond the community center. Some residents have banded together to oppose a plan to build headquarters for Burns & Scalo Inc., a Bridgeville roofing and real estate company, on the 47-acre site of the Crafton Golf Club. In hopes of preserving the land as green space, the group is trying to raise $1.5 million to buy the property.
Other residents favor the development, seeing it as a way to reduce taxes in a town without a commercial tax base. Local leaders have asked both sides to be considerate of each others’ feelings, a neighborly way to approach a problem. The Thornburg cousins, who lived in the town they built, would no doubt approve.
Bette McDevitt is a free-lance writer.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Urban writer scoffs at corridor plan
By Jeff Stacklin
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
October 6, 1998By redeveloping the Fifth and Forbes corridor with national retailers and restaurants, city planners will blow an opportunity to “do something interesting and innovative that won’t bankrupt the city,” an urban critic said Wednesday.
Instead of investing in a national developer, city leaders should assist local businesses by helping them market their wares and by government-funded programs to improve roads and buildings, said Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist, author and critic from New York City.
Gratz, author of “Cities Back from the Edge, New Life for Downtown,” spoke as part of the Making Cities Work lecture series. The lecture was sponsored by the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Pittsburgh Branch.
With slides, Gratz showed redevelopment projects that have worked in other U.S. cities and some that have not. She made a distinction between the reborn and rebuilt city – and favors the reborn city.
A rebuilt city is one where buildings are razed and replaced with new structures. A reborn city utilizes what’s already in place.
She scoffed at the proposed overhaul of Fifth and Forbes avenues as a rebuilding project that won’t work and will cost too much.
The plan, which has not been finalized, tentatively calls for the city to buy the properties lining the corridor, and then sell them to Urban Retail Properties, a Chicago-based firm.
The firm, which did not return phone calls yesterday, promises to attract an All-Star Cafe, a Planet Hollywood with a 24-screen movie theater and several national retailers.
The project is also expected to get plenty of tax dollars. Already, Gov. Tom Ridge has pledged $10 million in state grants. Mayor Tom Murphy has said he wants to provide $7 million in taxes reaped from a new Mellon Bank operations center. The project, which Urban Retail Properties brochures have called the Market Place at Fifth and Forbes, has been estimated to cost $170 million.
The developer and the city have yet to disclose how much of that cost will be underwritten by private sources.
Although many people can relate to the national chains, Gratz said her studies of other cities show they won’t attract more people Downtown.
“Why would someone come Downtown to a store they can find in a mall in the suburbs?” she asked.
The Fifth and Forbes corridor already is loaded with unique stores that offer a distinct flavor. It’s an area that can be reborn, Gratz said.
She suggested the city catalog existing businesses and what they sell. With that information, the city should launch an advertising campaign to market the area. She’s betting that within a year more people will come Downtown to patronize the stores.
“I don’t think people know how many local businesses will be displaced” by the redevelopment, Gratz said. “Local businesses should be treasured, not replaced.”
After her lecture, Gratz toured the Fifth and Forbes corridor, and stumbled upon The Headgear hat shop on Fifth Avenue. From cowboys hats to baseball caps, the store sells all styles and fashions of hats. It’s in a building that will be razed if the city’s plan is carried out.
“This goes?” she asked, shaking her head in dismay. The plan “makes less sense seeing it on the street than it did when I just heard about it.”
City Councilman Sala Udin is confident that the unique stores, such as the hat shop, will be relocated into the new development – although he could not guarantee that every wig shop and manicurist along the corridor would survive.
“Efforts are being made by the mayor’s office and the Urban Redevelopment Authority to find local businesses that contribute a progressive urban character and keep them in business and keep them in the mix,” Udin said.
Margaret McCormick Barron, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said that some businesses might be temporarily relocated while construction is taking place. She said “it’s premature” to say what businesses, if any, would be forced out of their buildings because of the development.
Udin said he appreciated many conclusions drawn by Gratz. However, the final plan for the Fifth and Forbes corridor has not been completed.
“The jury is still out on it,” Udin said. “What the final configuration of the Downtown ownership will look like is still to be determined.”
Barron said that the city’s new Downtown Plan includes market research that supports the Fifth and Forbes plan, and concludes that the national retailers and restaurants will draw customers.
“We stand by the plan,” she said. Gratz’s remarks suggested that “she seems to think we’re building a mall.” That’s not the case, Barron said.
Meanwhile, the mayor’s office said last night that Murphy planned an important economic development announcement this afternoon at Mellon Square, Downtown.