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Category Archive: Preservation News

  1. Building suppliers are key players in resurrection of historic homes

    09/07/2001

    By Bob Karlovits – TRIBUNE-REVIEW

    Argine Carter sees herself as something of a detective.

    Mike Gable looks at his work as a form of conservation.

    Eric Younkins says he often is simply a sharp set of eyes.

    Whether they’re dealing with woodwork, wallpaper or bricks, they’re all trying to help owners of historic homes in what can be a task amounting to thousands of dollars.

    They become key players in the tricky attempt to turn battered, old buildings into landmarks from another era.

    “You’re dealing with a certain type of person,” says Younkins, a counter manager at a Masterwork Paint & Decorating store in East Liberty. “I have 1,800 different colors and sometimes none of them is just the right thing.”

    With other materials, other issues come into play. For instance, Jim Dattilo, one of the owners of Pittsburgh Structural Clay Products in Oakland, says his company is asked to match bricks from older homes. Sometimes workers can match the size – but the real problem is the color.

    That’s because the Environmental Protection Agency has disallowed the use of some chemicals that create those colors because they are dangerous.

    “Still, we can match about 90 percent of the bricks people ask us to,” he says.

    Homeowners often are directed to suppliers through agencies such as the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. Every year, the foundation has an Old House Fair that is a gathering place for dealers in historically rooted supplies and contractors for such jobs.

    Cathy McCollom, the group’s director of operations and marketing, says the event attracts about 1,000 people, but generates so many inquiries afterward the foundation has begun “overprinting” the program with information on the dealers.

    “We don’t recommend people, though,” McCollom says. “We just supply the names.” She says the event helps provide links to dealers and contractors, and also creates some networking among homeowners. “You know how Pittsburgh is,” she says. “It is a great word-of-mouth city.

    Renovators also can contact enthusiasts such as Fred Mannion, president of the Manchester Historic Society, who is renovating his home and says he is eager to see other people doing the same.

    “We can send you places like the Architecture Emporium in Canonsburg, and we also know people who are so dedicated to repairs they will come in the middle of the night,” he says.

    Or they might deal with an architect such as Shelley Clement from Sewickley who says she does 90 percent of her work in renovation of historic homes. She says she knows of supply dealers who are good to deal with because they are mentally attuned to renovation.

    Ron Mistick, purchasing director for Allegheny Millwork, for example, has about 150 to 200 profiles of baseboards and pieces of quarter-round trim at the South Side lumber yard. Fifteen percent to 20 percent of the yard’s business is in replacing those pieces for renovations.

    When workers see a sample four or five times, they add it to the design files so future buyers might be able to find the style they need.

    “People can then see it in the catalog and order it without paying for any setup time,” Mistick says.

    Similarly, Allegheny Moulding on the North Side has pattern books that can help staffers produce woodwork that fits older homes, says Mark Shar, the company’s technical supervisor. The books allow them to create pieces even when they don’t have samples to guide them.

    Mike Gable, executive director of Construction Junction in Lawrenceville, says he is looking for a way to help people save money – and to promote conservation as well. He describes his company as “sort of a used Home Depot.”

    The company gets all sorts of supplies – from cornices to lumber – then offers them to builders and renovators. Because the firm is centered on matters other than renovation, he says, its historic items amount to 15 percent to 20 percent of its supply at any one time.

    “But if you want to whip up the paint stripper or fire up the steel wool, we could be the place,” he says.

    Firms of these sorts sometimes can get customers from all over the country. Argine Carter of Carter & Co. of Vallejo, Calif., has made a career out of creating historically correct wallpaper. Those efforts have taken her from doing the paper for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” in South Dakota to President James Garfield’s residence in Ohio.

    She says there is “a lot of detective work” in what she and her staff do because they have to work from an assortment of clues rather than a good sample of the object they are duplicating. That often means trying to find out what colors might have been used and reproducing a pattern from a quarter-inch image from a battered photograph.

    About 30 percent of the work she does is initiated by individual homeowners and the other 70 percent by parks organizations or civic renovators. Most often, she adds designs they have made to the firm’s catalog. Then they can be used by other home renovators who, like Mistick’s customers, get a break in the price for items in the book.

    She doesn’t add all the designs, though.

    “Bad taste back then was just as bad as it is now,” she says.

    While reproducing paper can be difficult, paint generally is not as big of an issue in historical renovations. While some commercial housing developments have agreements – known as covenants – that govern what colors can be used on the exterior of homes, there are no real restrictions in historical projects.

    The “Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Preservation & Guidelines for Preserving Historic Buildings” suggests only to use colors that “are historically appropriate to the building and district.”

    The City of Pittsburgh’s Historic Review Commission’s guidelines insist on the rights to review all paint jobs “to avoid odd or extreme color schemes.” The guidelines, however, set “no requirements to use any particular type or color of paint.”

    Sharon Park from the National Park Service says that agency makes no color demands in its governance of the National Register of Historic Places.

    She says she’s more concerned with whether a paint does the job on its surface. For instance, it is more important to use a waterproof paint on an exterior than to be concerned with a historically “correct” color, she says.

    Paints for historic homes, therefore, have become a rather simple issue. Technicians at dealers such as Masterwork, Home Depot and even smaller firms have “color eyes” that can duplicate nearly any color, Younkins reports.

    Most often, he and other dealers say, the historic color lines produced by manufactures such as PPG, Pratt and Lambert or Behr fit the bill.

    With paint or other items, determination is the key, Younkins suggests.

    “How deep the project goes depends on the tenacity of the person who wants it done,” he says

    This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © Tribune Review

  2. These old houses – Restoration projects take dedication, hard work

    09/07/2001

    By Bob Karlovits, TRIBUNE-REVIEW

    Renovation of historic homes is an avocation that never seems to falter, but its popularity at any moment can be hard to judge.

    Director of operations and marketing for the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, says increasing interest is reflected in the growing number of people at the group’s Old House Fair ever year.

    “When I see the addresses of people and see Friendship or the South Side, I can see we’re dealing with the old housing stock,” she says.

    Mark Shar, technical supervisor of Allegheny Mouldings on the North Side, a company that produces woodwork for home projects, sees involvement with older homes as a steady fascination. He says 60 percent to 70 percent of his company’s work is in such jobs.

    “Interest in redoing older homes has been strong since the early ’70s,” he says. “It’s no flash in the pan.”

    Others in the industry say they see something of a decline. Ron Mistick, director of the South Side lumber yard for Allegheny Millworks, says there are fewer renovators seeking specialty wood than there were in the mid-’80s.

    “People are just putting in what they want to,” he says.

    Eric Younkins, a paint counter manager in the East Liberty Masterwork Paint & Decorating store, says he gets deeply involved in finding “historically correct” paint about 10 times a year.

    When people get involved in renovation, the tasks can be addictive, according to Michael Santmeyer and Christopher Kerr of Manchester. They spent about $80,000 and 14 months renovating a Gothic Revival home – and now have it up for sale. That’s because they want to move on to their next North Side revival project, which will be their third.

    “I know I’m never going to live in another house like this one,” Santmeyer says. “But it’s time to move on.”

    Fred Mannion, president of the Manchester Historic Society, has spent 11 years redoing a 12-room home from 1890. And the work is nearly done.

    “A lot of people are doing this because they want to turn a buck,” he says, “but most people just get caught up in making the homes look they way they could.”

    Jeff and Shannon Mulholland got caught up in renovations when they bought a Queen Anne home in Edgeworth two years ago. They started doing some home improvements and decided to try to make it as faithful to the period as possible.

    “For instance, we redid one of the bathrooms and took out the ’80s vanity,” she says. “It took a while to find the kind of sink that we wanted, but you can’t get too frustrated.”

    That sort of dedication emerged when they began looking into an addition. They hired architect Shelley Clement, co-author of a book on historic homes in the Sewickley Valley. Mulholland says Clement paid attention to subtle things such as the size and shape of the bricks and the gentle sloping of the exterior walls.

    It’s important to pay that sort of attention to the exterior of buildings, but generally not the interiors private homes, say local and federal officials. Private homes may get totally modern interiors and not lose any historic status, according to Sharon Park, chief of technical preservation from the National Park Service.

    Manchester’s Mannion, for instance, added a totally modern apartment behind the 1890s exterior of the carriage house of his home while keeping the main house entirely historic. Both still fit into Manchester Historic District guidelines.

    Similarly, the Fitzsimmons Square project being developed along Allegheny Avenue will have entirely new interiors, but still will meet district guidelines, says Mario Costanzo from Howard Hanna Real Estate.

    Interest in renovation also, obviously, demands a supply of older housing stock. The Historic Review Commission for the city of Pittsburgh, the Historical Architecture Review Board for Homestead, West Homestead and Munhall, for example, help point out and develop that stock.

    “Establishing a district as historic tends to stabilize a neighborhood,” says Angelique Bamberg of the city’s Historic Review Commission.

    “A renewal is a win-win situation,” says Dennis Freeland is executive director of the Perry Hilltop Association for Successful Enterprise, a group that guides or initiates renewal. “When you have an crumbling house, nobody benefits. Nobody’s living there. They city is getting no tax money. The neighborhood suffers.”

    But renewal can lead to the manifestation of an architectural style.

    “You have to be able to see what a house can be and not concentrate on what it isn’t,” Santmeyer says.

    – Bob Karlovits can be reached at (412) 320-7852 or bkarlovits@tribweb.com.

    This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © Tribune Review

  3. Heinz Hall celebrates 30 years as home of the symphony

    09/06/2001

    By Mark Kanny, Tribune Review Classical Music Critic

    When the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra moved from the Syria Mosque in Oakland to the former Loew’s Penn Theater on Sixth Street, Downtown, it had its own home for the first time. It also marked the start of what has become the Cultural District, centralizing the arts Downtown among the corporate giants that support it.

    The venue’s 30th anniversary was commemmorated Wednesday with a plaque from the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation that recognizes the importance of Heinz Hall architecturally and to the city’s quality of life.

    The opening of Heinz Hall on Sept. 10, 1971, was national news, covered by two reporters from the New York Times, as well as other out-of-town journalists. The major Pittsburgh papers were on strike, but local coverage was provided by the Valley News Dispatch and Market Square news.

    The symphony had previously performed in Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland, but its stage is too small for a full symphony orchestra, let alone choral works such as Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Syria Mosque was no more than a stopgap, with serious acoustical problems.

    Hopes were high for the new hall. At the time, conversion of movie theaters into concert halls was considered a good way to save money, since completely new buildings are more expensive to build. City music lovers took note of the success of the conversion of Powell Hall in St. Louis, which boasts warmly appealing acoustics.

    Alas, opening night was a gala social event and an acoustical disaster. Heinz Hall has been visually appealing from day one, but sound is the most important feature of any concert hall.

    Although out-of-town critics liked the sound on opening night, Pittsburgh music lovers were vociferous in condemnation of Heinz Hall acoustics. So much for some critics!

    Part of the difficulty was that the large chorus needed for Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony forced the shell surrounding the performers out of position opening night. When the shell was in the position intended by acoustician Karl Keilholz in the following weeks, Heinz Hall sounded much better, but still had serious problems, especially the lack of bass.

    Most of the problems derived from the financial necessity to use Heinz Hall for opera, ballet and theatrical productions. Multi-purpose halls always suffer in comparison with dedicated concert halls. In fact, it took a decade for musicians to win a hardwood stage floor. Hardwood is more stressful for dancers, but necessary for good bass response.

    A major renovation in the summer of 1995 greatly improved the acoustics, but certainly did not solve all the problems. Local music lovers will hear a new sound next week, when a new seating arrangement will provide added focus to the string sound.

    The first music played in Heinz Hall was Beethoven’s “The Consecration of the House” Overture. Only musicians can truly consecrate a concert hall and fulfill its potential to transform the lives of those in attendance. The more than 2,500 symphonic concerts and more than 4,000 other performances since opening night have made Heinz Hall the heart of music life in Pittsburgh.

    – Mark Kanny can be reached at (412) 320-7877 or mkanny@tribweb.com.

  4. Homewood Cemetery tree-cutting plan rankles landscapers

    Wednesday, August 29, 2001

    By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic

    In removing hundreds of trees from Homewood Cemetery, its chief operating officer says he’s just following a plan devised by Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.

    Not exactly, says the man who wrote the March 1998 analysis of existing conditions and recommendations for landscape restoration.

    “I’ve never seen clearing done in a historic landscape with such a broad brush,” said Barry Hannegan, PHLF’s director of historic design programs.

    Hannegan and PHLF horticulturist Greg Yochum served as consultants to the project, working with Landmarks Design Associates, which developed a preservation plan for the buildings, drives and infrastructure. The group recommended the work, estimated to cost $2.8 million, be done over a 10-year period to spread out the cost, with stabilization achieved first and restoration later.

    Established in 1878 on what had been part of Judge William Wilkins’ estate, Homewood Cemetery was designed as a lawn or park cemetery, with no mounded graves and no stone coping or fences around graves to break up the unified landscape.

    To create the cemetery, the heavily wooded Wilkins land was virtually clear cut. Most of the mature trees that exist today were planted by William Allen, superintendent from 1907 to 1935, a Welshman who had worked at London’s Kew Gardens and a former manager of Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery.

    America’s first landscaped cemetery, Mount Auburn in 1831 pioneered the rural, romantic style that soon replaced the overcrowded, unkempt, urban graveyards and churchyards. As much a pleasure ground for the living as a reliquary for the dead, Mount Auburn featured fenced plots and monuments in a sylvan setting of winding roads, trees, shrubs and ponds.

    In 1855, the superintendent of Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery banished the individual plot fences that were giving cemeteries a cluttered, chaotic appearance. Adolph Strauch’s “lawn plan” heralded a new kind of cemetery, with headstones under 2 feet high and the occasional taller monuments and sculptures set in an open, park-like landscape of meadows and gently rolling hills.

    Homewood remains Pittsburgh’s only lawn and park cemetery, although later parts developed according to the fashion of the day, with geometrically patterned, art deco-inspired sections, mausoleums, flush markers and urn gardens added in the 20th century.

    “Through the years the cemetery does reflect these various philosophies, and that’s why we’re so unique” in Western Pennsylvania, said assistant treasurer and cemetery archivist Marilyn Evert, co-author of “Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture.”

    And while Homewood banned fences, it did allow families to install trees and shrubs on their plots. Over time, many of the cemetery’s trees, either self-seeded or planted by William Allen or by plot owners, have become overgrown, diseased or storm-damaged.

    With buildings also needing attention, the cemetery turned to Landmarks Design Associates for a plan for structures and landscape. While Hannegan’s landscape report establishes guidelines, it is not a working document with tree-by-tree recommendations.

    Because there was no documentation for the landscape design beyond the cemetery’s collection of historic photographs, “We recommended the reinforcement of historic elements where we could perceive them,” Hannegan said. “For example, we urged the re-establishment of the row of sycamore trees [planted along Dallas Avenue in the 1920s]. They had lost their identity as a major boundary feature and we thought that should be recovered.”

    While the report suggests the cemetery “re-establish the line of sycamore along Dallas Avenue by planting new trees where earlier ones have been lost,” nowhere does it recommend the removal of all of the trees except the sycamores.

    Still, much of the clearing of the dense, volunteer trees, while shocking, was necessary to protect the graves and tombstones they had grown up around and to prevent further damage to the cemetery’s perimeter iron fence.

    Stump grinding along Dallas is under way, and when the 66 new sycamores, each 6 to 8 feet tall, are planted this fall and spring, the fence repaired and the tombstones reset, the changes will have been a long-term improvement. On a tour of the cemetery last week, Hannegan said planting hydrangeas under the sycamore canopy would buffer and soften the transition between street and cemetery.

    William Heinnickel, the cemetery’s chief operating officer, said trees will be cut along the cemetery’s other borders “if they become an annoyance or interfere with the plan.” While there is no immediate plan to cut trees along Forbes Avenue, some will be cut eventually because they’re interfering with phone and power lines. The LDA report makes no specific recommendations for trees along Forbes.

    “I really haven’t looked at Forbes yet,” Heinnickel said. “I selected Dallas first because that’s where our front gate is and I want that to be the nicest.”

    The landscape around the cemetery’s three granite mausoleums also has been significantly altered, with dozens of evergreen trees, mostly yews, removed.

    The LDA report advocates “a careful, knowledgeable program of pruning,” then adds, “Failing this, the existing materials should be removed and replaced by less vigorous types.”

    Heinnickel said the yews will be replanted, perhaps as early as next spring or fall. He said a mature maple and pin oak also were cut down because they were dropping leaves onto the roofs and causing leaks. The mausoleums’ roofs will be replaced.

    Evergreens — hemlocks and yews — adjacent to the administration and chapel buildings were removed, according to the report, which advised these trees had “grown beyond [their] desired role as an ornamental setting for the buildings.” The cemetery has asked garden designer Marley Wolff to create a planting plan for this area, based on historic photographs.

    At the pond area, near the main entrance on Dallas, LDA’s recommendations were to “remove all invasive plant materials from the small grove to the west of the pond including wild grape vine and ‘nuisance trees’ such as ailanthus” and “prune existing mature trees.”

    Instead, the area around the pond was leveled, and what had been a wild bird habitat with mature mulberry, cherry and maple trees is now a barren landscape.

    “There were trees there that would have created a little backdrop for the pond,” Hannegan said.

    Heinnickel said he had the trees cut down because they were a safety hazard.

    “You had a blind curve that you couldn’t see around,” he said.

    Thinning the trees and removing the grapevine, however, would have achieved the same end.

    Hannegan also recommended planting eight willows along the south edge of the pond, in keeping with its 1920s appearance, when willows surrounded the pond. Heinnickel hopes to plant a dozen willows around the pond, and that will be done in October, weather and manpower permitting. The cemetery also plans to dredge and restore the pond; what was once a reflecting pool is thick with cattails and water lilies that almost entirely cover its surface.

    Throughout the cemetery, about 200 storm-damaged and diseased trees will be removed, following the LDA report.

    While the report also recommends identifying and labeling with botanical names about 100 trees throughout the cemetery, Heinnickel said he has no plans to do so. That should be reconsidered, because it would acknowledge and interpret the cemetery as the informal arboretum it has become, and could be done at no great expense.

    It also would be a gesture of goodwill to the neighborhood, which still is grieving the unanticipated loss of the trees and bird habitat.

    While privately owned, the nonprofit cemetery is viewed by many as an extension of adjacent Frick Park. Neighbors have a sense of ownership about the place, but they don’t have a say. Heinnickel doesn’t expect to give them one because he believes public input would be too diverse to be helpful.

    Maybe so. But in the interest of being a good neighbor, the cemetery could keep its neighbors better informed.

    This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. Homestead Council upset it didn’t know of plans for historic firehouse

    Wednesday, August 15, 2001

    By Jim Hosek, Tri-State Sports & News Service

    Correction/Clarification: (Published Aug. 22, 2001) Homestead Councilman Marvin Brown was incorrectly identified in the Aug. 15 South as saying he joined Councilwoman Joan DeSimone in being upset to learn from the Post-Gazette about Homestead’s receiving a Hillman Foundation grant toward renovating the borough’s historic firehouse.

    Homestead Council expressed displeasure Monday about being kept in the dark about a possible $2 million renovation of the borough’s historic firehouse and possible grants for the project.
    Irvin E. Williams, president of Ebony Development, told members he has worked with the volunteer fire department and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation on refurbishing the building and adding an annex to make it into a municipal center to house the fire department, plus municipal and emergency medical offices.

    He said many funding sources have been identified, so the borough would need to contribute only about $200,000; he has applied for grants from sources he declined to identify; and his company would manage the project and assemble a construction team.

    “But this is our project, and this is our first meeting with you,” Councilwoman Cheryl Chapman said. “The building belongs to the borough,” added Councilwoman Joan DeSimone. “Council has to make the decisions.”

    DeSimone and Councilman Marvin Brown said they were upset to learn from the Post-Gazette about the borough receiving a grant from the Hillman Foundation for the firehouse. They wanted to know if the borough really has that and other grants identified by History & Landmarks — and where the money is.

    Joe Hohman of Resource, Development & Management Inc., which oversees the borough’s financially distressed status for the state, was taken aback by Williams’ comments about putting together a construction team. “All the work would have to be bid competitively,” he said.

    After hearing everything, Williams said, “Until this council supports this project, this rehabilitation and expansion will go nowhere.”

    Council agreed to form a municipal complex committee of DeSimone, Chapman, Evan Baker and William Batts and meet with Williams and the fire department.

    If hired by council as project manager, Williams said his fee would be 4 percent of the project, instead of an industry standard of 8 or 10 percent. He encouraged council to act quickly, because, “there’s an urgent need to get this building fixed.”

    This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette

  8. Important moments in history of Soldiers & Sailors

    Monday, August 13, 2001

    1891 — The local posts of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans from the Civil War, introduce the idea of a memorial hall to recognize veterans of the “War for the Suppression of the Rebellion of the Southern Slaveholders,” known today as the Civil War.

    1906 — Land is purchased in Oakland for purpose of building the memorial.

    1907-08 — Construction of the building, which was designed after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The architect was Henry H. Hornbostel.

    1910 — Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall was officially dedicated “in honor of soldiers, sailors and marines from Allegheny County who served in defense of the Union.” The hall was managed by a board of Civil War veterans.

    1936 — After $200,000 in federal Works Progress Administration money is spent to rehabilitate the hall, Hornbostel calls for it to be used as a meeting hall, for public and political meetings. Colonel C.H. William Ruhe, superintendent of the hall, disagrees. “The people were not creating a public hall, but a memorial for soldiers,” he says.

    1946-47 — Allegheny County installs a new acoustics system and public address system and appropriated $47,000 to improve the roof and elevators.

    1947 — A Pittsburgh Press story describes Soldiers & Sailors as “Oakland’s White Elephant,” which has “had about as much activity as a deserted monastery.” Political, un-American, controversial and foreign language meetings were prohibited; dancing, smoking and liquor were blacklisted.

    1963 — The hall is rededicated to honor the memory of all veterans from all wars in which the United States may be engaged.

    1967 — Pittsburgh History and Landmarks bestows “Landmark” status on the hall.

    1974 — The hall is entered into the National Register of Historic Places.

    1979 — The ship’s bell, from the U.S.S. Pittsburgh, is mounted on the front patio and dedicated.

    1987 — The International Peace Pole is placed near the front door, a gift of an international visitor.

    1988 — The veterans board sues Allegheny County after the commissioners fail to provide enough money for the hall to operate.

    1989 — A parking garage is built under the front lawn of the hall as a way to generate additional revenues.

    1991 — The hall is designated as a city historic structure by city resolution.

    2000 — The hall leaves the control of Allegheny County and becomes an independent, nonprofit trust.

    This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette

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