Category Archive: Preservation News
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South Side church converting to condos
Wednesday, February 14, 2001
By Jan Ackerman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
While retaining its historic character, one of the South Side’s most beloved old Catholic churches and its rectory will be converted into high-end, residential condominiums.
St. Michael Church on Pius Street on the South Side Slopes, was closed in 1992 as part of a reorganization by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. At that time, the diocese “desanctified” the church, removing the altar and other religious items from inside.
“The interior is completely gutted,” said Jennifer McCarthy, an architect with Hanson Design Group Ltd., the South Side firm that is designing the proposed condominiums for Thomas Tripoli, a South Side developer.
She said some residents have stopped by to see what is going on at the old church and expressed concern that the church they attended for so many years was being measured and studied for possible renovation.
McCarthy said most of the stained glass was removed from the church five or six years ago. “The altar was ripped out. Anything that had a cross or any sort of religious symbol is gone.”
Yesterday, Pittsburgh City Council gave its final approval to a resolution giving historic designation to the church and rectory. Mayor Tom Murphy now has to sign off on that resolution.
With the historic designation, the two buildings officially come under the purview of the city’s Historic Review Commission, which already has approved plans for renovating them.
Tripoli, who plans to live in one of the condominiums, is proposing to convert the buildings into about 25 condominiums, ranging in area from 1,000 to 2,000 or 3,000 square feet. He said the units will be priced from $150,000 to $250,000.
McCarthy said the first phase of the project will be renovation of the rectory. Once one of the largest in the city, it was the first home in the United States for the Passionist order of priests who staffed the parish from 1853 to 1973.
She said the church renovation will be more involved since new floors and an elevator will be added. She said window sills will be lowered on the Pius Street side of the church to allow more light to get inside. On the side of the church that faces Downtown, she said, “we are going to lower the window sills, put in French doors and small wrought iron terraces.”
The church, which was constructed in a German Romanesque style, has a basilica with a prominent center tower and a clerestory. It was designed by Pittsburgh architect Charles S. Bartberger, who later designed the Passionists’ St. Paul of the Cross Monastery on Monastery Avenue on the South Side.
Walter Kidney, architectural historian for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, nominated the St. Michael buildings for the historic designation. Neighborhood groups, including the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association, favor the designation.
“The building has been part of the social fabric of the South Side Slopes for almost 150 years,” wrote Edward F. Jacob, president of the neighborhood association.
Built between 1858 and 1860, St. Michael Church became Pittsburgh’s first Catholic church south of the Monongahela River and the third church built for a German congregation.
Two St. Michael parish traditions have been retained, even though the church is closed.
One is the presentation of “Veronica’s Veil,” the passion play written by a priest from St. Michael in 1913 that has been staged every year since during Lent. “Veronica’s Veil” is now performed in the auditorium at 18th and Pius streets, a building that used to be part of the St. Michael parochial school.
The second is Cholera Day, the feast day of St. Roch, patron saint of plagues, who was credited with sparing parishioners from the cholera attack of 1849. That traditional day began at St. Michael, but was moved to Prince of Peace, the reorganized parish.
In the fall, the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese objected to historic designation for the church and rectory, saying it would prolong the diocese’s efforts to sell the buildings. Last week, Tripoli closed the real estate deal on the buildings before City Council held the final hearing on that designation.
The sale price has not yet been recorded in the Allegheny County recorder of deeds office. The property has a market value of $350,000, according to county records.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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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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A million dollar renovation restored a Fifth Avenue mansion once thought uninhabitable
Saturday, February 10, 2001
By Gretchen McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In the mid 1920s, one of the grandest residences along Shadyside’s famed “Millionaires Row” was the house located at 5061 Fifth Ave.
Built between 1870 and 1871 by William B. Negley and expanded in 1922 by stone contractor Edward Gwinner, this elegant, three-story Second Empire house boasted everything a wealthy urbanite could ask for: grand marble entrance hall with a winding staircase and bronze balustrade, 13-foot ceilings, rooms paneled in English oak and walnut and a large veranda overlooking fabulous gardens. In his 1985 book “Landmark Architecture: Pittsburgh and Allegheny County,” architectural historian Walter Kidney called the Gwinner-Harter house “a handsome object in its spacious and well-landscaped grounds.”
But just two years later, while the home was being renovated, workers using a paint-stripping gun inadvertently caught a third-floor closet on fire. By the time firefighters had quenched the flames, the entire third floor was gone.
When the owner, physician Leo Harter, died six months later, the property — boarded up and topped with a plastic tarp — became something of a white elephant. Preservationists felt the house was not salvageable and neighbors considered it a “burned-out monstrosity.” A proposal in 1993 to level the mansion and replace it with luxury condominiums failed for lack of buyers. The only practical solution seemed demolition.
Then in June 1995, just a few weeks before the wrecking ball was to fall, restoration contractor Joetta Sampson took a tour — and saw something the others had missed.
“It was just the most incredible piece of architecture, a once-in-a-lifetime property,” recalls Sampson, who has restored more than a dozen old homes in Pittsburgh since 1990. Even with plywood for windows and no electricity, it remained a grand home, she says
“I felt like it deserved a chance at rebirthing.”
Her husband, Ben, a third-generation builder and developer, agreed, and a few weeks later the couple bought the house for $700,000 and set about the arduous task of rebuilding it. Nine months and $1 million later, it had been lovingly and completely restored. Nearly two years ago, the Sampsons put it up for sale for $1.5 million. It is still available at that price, now marketed by Coldwell Banker.
Maybe it’s the price tag (or the $34,000 annual tax bill). Some potential buyers might be intimidated by the house’s size and stature or overwhelmed at the thought of how to furnish it. Others may be put off by its proximity to Fifth Avenue. Sampson, however, maintains that the house’s elaborate gardens, which include a maze, distances the house from that busy thoroughfare, both visually and audibly.
“It’s actually an incredibly peaceful place,” she says, “a serene oasis.”
Sampson doesn’t think the million-dollar-plus price tag is a deterrent. Six houses in the immediate area have sold for more than $1.3 million in the past year, she says, and “people will pay all day long for a new mansion in the suburbs.”
“No one has ever looked at it and thought it was overpriced,” she says.
And though the couple will most likely lose money on the sale, Sampson doesn’t regret a single dollar spent on the restoration, even the small fortune they sunk into the master bath. What she does regret, she says, is that Pittsburghers don’t seem to appreciate this kind of quality workmanship and architecture.
“If the house were located somewhere where people understand and appreciate the urban lifestyle — say San Francisco — it would sell very quickly.”
One of the most difficult (and expensive) tasks the Sampsons faced during their restoration was rebuilding the slate mansard roof and replacing the third-floor floor joists. Luckily, the couple had blueprints of the original design, but it still took workers months to recreate the roof’s nine dormers and lay the hand-cut, fish-scale slates.
With the roof on, they then turned their attention to the space beneath it. The result is one of the most striking rooms in the house.
The size of a small apartment, the 30- by 40-foot master suite is organized around a center colonnade and features a separate sitting room and two dressing rooms with floor-to-ceiling closets. There is also an 18- by 21-foot pink-and-gray marble bathroom, complete with claw foot tub, oversized walk-in shower and his-and-her two-legged sinks.
“We wanted our own adult living space,” says Sampson, who received some “really great inspiration” from architect John Martine.
Pale yellow rag-rolled walls, 11 faux marble pillars and century-old wide-plank, heart-of-pine flooring add an air of elegance. Dating from the 1880s, the wood was rescued from a mill that was closing in Vermont that Sampson had read about in Preservation magazine.
The rest of the home, which was completely rewired and air-conditioned, is equally impressive. The major focal point of the facade is the front porch, which winds halfway around the house and has been reconstructed with imported German tile. In picking the sunny yellow for the facade, Sampson was inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
A pair of solid bronze front doors lead into a spacious entry hall constructed entirely of 1-inch-thick translucent marble. It has an ornate floor-to-ceiling marble mantelpiece and French doors leading out onto the verandah. The library, one of three rooms designed by Pittsburgh architect Frederick Osterling in 1922, boasts walnut and golden oak flooring in a large checkerboard pattern, German leaded-glass windows topped by stained glass and a coved plaster ceiling with pheasants and flowers in high relief. There is also a carved limestone mantel and overmantel.
The graceful sitting parlor has basket-weave inlay flooring, an Italian marble fireplace and a Bradbury & Bradbury wallpapered ceiling. (It took Sampson the better half of 10 days, working late at night, to assemble the intricate design.) The adjoining dining room has golden oak paneling and flooring, a limestone mantel and overmantel and a coffered, red-painted ceiling.
The 15- by 14-foot kitchen features marble countertops and white and mossy green porcelain tile walls and floor, as well as a turn-of-the-century Magic Chef stove (it still works). Antique birch cabinets, which Sampson refinished herself, stretch all the way to the ceiling. Just off the kitchen, a Westinghouse elevator shuttles visitors to the second floor, which has large four bedrooms, a sitting room and four baths. All the windows have interior wooden shutters. The property also includes a three-car, heated carriage house with a one-bedroom/one-bath apartment on top.
The Sampsons worked with landscape gardener Richard Liberto to create the formal Victorian garden, which cost more than $40,000 and is planted with old-fashioned perennials like hollyhocks. The 3 1/2-foot-deep pond features Japanese iris that bloom every year as well as a circa 1920 fountain Sampson discovered at an auction in Georgia and had installed “with great difficulty.”
Too many 19th-century mansions, says Sampson, have spaces that blow you away but aren’t really designed to live in.
“They just don’t have that warmth,” she says.
That’s not a problem with the Gwinner-Harter home.
“It’s great gathering place for both family and friends,” says Sampson, who adds she would love to help the new owners decorate. “And living quarters are well designed so everyone has his or her own space.”
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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City officials hope Plan C will lure developers-Mayor says latest effort depends upon cooperation
By Elizabeth Barczak
TRIBUNE-REVIEW 02/04/2001
In the wake of the flood of protest over plans to raze and revamp part of Downtown Pittsburgh, a fresh attempt is turning the torrent toward a path of lesser resistance.
Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy finds himself wooing Downtown business leaders in his attempt to create a Plan C that meets his goal of making Downtown a destination for developers and suburban shoppers.
Plan C is said to stand for compromise as Murphy tries to mesh his vision with the demands of Downtown business owners and pervasive preservationists.
The future of the Fifth and Forbes corridor hangs in the balance as the Plan C task force strives to reach a consensus. The 15-member task force, which includes business leaders and local officials, is expected to make its recommendations to the mayor’s office this month.
After years of controversy over the fate of Fifth and Forbes, the task force’s recommendations could have a profound effect on the future of Downtown.
“I think in two years, maybe in one year, Fifth and Forbes will look different than it does today, and I think Downtown will continue to evolve,” said director of operations at the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
“There’s a clear indication and a clear understanding that something should happen quickly … a sort of a shoe leather hitting the street, so to speak,” McCollom said. “The idea is don’t rehash, don’t redo, don’t reinvent the wheel but move forward with the task at hand.”
McCollom opposed plans to raze Downtown buildings to make way for national retailers.
Murphy’s initial $522 million proposal called for the demolition of 62 Downtown properties to make way for new development. That plan died in November after upscale retailer Nordstrom Inc. pulled the plug on plans to anchor the project.
A second proposal harkened back to an earlier era with a Main Street approach that preserved many smaller businesses.
Now, Plan C holds the promise of merging the ideas into one cohesive plan.
“Any plan has to be one that moves with market forces … kind of an evolving plan, a living breathing plan,” McCollom said. “In our opinion, it is very difficult and risky to force the market by plopping this plan down in the middle of Downtown.”
The risks involved include investing millions of public dollars into a plan with an unknown return as well as alienating long-standing business owners.
Jeff Joyce, a Plan C task force member, called for a broad plan that reaches beyond Fifth and Forbes. Joyce is the president of the Market Square Association and owner of the 1902 Landmark Tavern.
“If we do the center of the city right, that will bring more investment and continued investment in housing so the business district will be able to grow from there,” he said.
Joyce said many of his customers recognize the need to revitalize Downtown.
“Everyone realizes that the Fifth and Forbes corridor needs change,” Joyce said. “The majority are for dramatic change, radical change.”
Joyce supported the mayor’s original plan but now is committed to working toward a compromise.
“The issues are the same – housing, parking and public transportation. All of these things need to be improved upon,” Joyce said. “I think there is still enough momentum left over from the first plan to build upon.”
Joyce said he expects a plan to be in place within a year with implementation over the next few years.
The question remains if the diverse task force will be able to reach a consensus and whether the mayor will accept its recommendations. Murphy said he would withhold judgment on the task force’s effectiveness until the recommendations are made.
“If the Plan C task force is not able to come up with a working plan and reach a consensus, then I think that the momentum will probably die over the next few months,” Joyce said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © Tribune Review
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Boston example touted as form of urban utopia
By Elizabeth Barczak
TRIBUNE-REVIEW 02/04/2001
As the two-year tug-of-war over the future of Fifth and Forbes continues, champions of change are pointing north to Boston as an example of urban utopia.
Boston is being touted as a model for Pittsburgh to follow. Although Beantown’s population is nearly twice that of the Steel City, some local business leaders say Pittsburgh officials can learn from Boston’s recent revitalization.
Boston’s Main Streets program has been a topic of conversation at recent Plan C task force meetings.
The 15-member task force is charged with coming up with a recommendation to replace the mayor’s defeated Market Place plan.
“We need to look at Boston. There are lessons to be learned there that can be brought back to Pittsburgh,” said director of operations at the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
In the past six years, Boston’s Main Streets program has restored or renovated 120 storefronts. The program helped to create more than 300 new businesses and almost 2,500 jobs.
Boston officials have defined 19 local business districts.
“We know what works,” McCollom said. “We need a sense of district, destination, cleanliness and marketing. … We need a sense of place realized by the retention of historic buildings.”
McCollom said she would welcome large retailers Downtown if they agreed to move into existing buildings.
The concept is one that could be an easier sell to local business owners who balked at Mayor Tom Murphy’s $522 million plan to raze 62 buildings. The plan would have displaced 125 businesses to make way for national retailers.
Murphy’s proposal died in November after upscale retailer Nordstrom Inc. pulled out as the anchor of the project.
The Plan C task force is expected to make its recommendation to Murphy by the end of the month.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © Tribune Review
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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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Commandments plaque historically important
01/11/2001-
Timothy Engleman letter to the editor
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Christian. As the result of an enlightening class at Shadyside Presbyterian Church, I recognize that the first four of the Ten Commandments tie them inextricably to the Judeo-Christian belief system. However, I oppose their removal from the Allegheny County Courthouse on neither religious nor political grounds.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. I argue that the Ten Commandments plaque should stay in place to preserve the fabric and integrity of the architecture. I know the plaque was not affixed at the building’s erection. I know nearly a century in place does give it historical significance.
Ancient Rome’s Vitruvius stated architecture’s three tenets: Commodity (function), Firmness (sound construction) and Delight (esthetic appeal). Architectural esthetics means not only form, color and texture, but also the expression of ideas. In a public building, commonly held ideals are often expressed quite literally. At the turn of the 20th century, posting of the Ten Commandments would have met with wide approval, and sensitivity to minority views was not an important issue. Removal of the plaque, now, amounts to historical revisionism.
Above the Grant Street entrance to the Courthouse is carved, “A.D. MDCCCLXXXIV,” or Anno Domini (Year of Our Lord) 1884. Presumably, this reference to Jesus Christ is potentially offensive or intimidating to an even wider population than the Ten Commandments. Shall we chisel away the stone and deface the architecture by substituting the “Common Era” as our temporal benchmark?
Why not just place another plaque below the Ten Commandments? Its text: “The above artifact is historical in nature, and does not necessarily reflect the precepts of Allegheny County Government.”
Timothy C. Engleman
Saxonburg
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Company in the Spotlight: Gustine builds on the family name
Sunday, January 07, 2001
By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Real estate developer Frank Gustine Jr. did not like to pay attention in school. “I was the typical jock,” he said. “I didn’t go to class much, I guess.”
There was no time.
As a University of Pittsburgh athlete in the late 1960s, Gustine played football, basketball and baseball. By his sophomore year, Gustine started at quarterback, had the No. 1 pitching spot on Pitt’s baseball team and played backup guard for the basketball team. He ended college as Pitt’s first three-sport letterman since Mike Ditka.
Despite his academic shortcomings, Gustine made the transition to commercial real estate look as easy as catching a lazy pop fly. After a few years selling rings and yearbooks for a former Pitt coach, Gustine ran into Ron Puntil, vice president of a Pittsburgh-based real estate firm called Oliver Realty.
Based on that one meeting, Puntil offered Gustine a job.
“He had a great personality, and I felt he was a hard-working kind of guy,” Puntil said. “I just had a good feeling about him, that’s all.”
More than 25 years later, Gustine is the chief executive officer of a company that owns 24 properties totaling 3.9 million square feet. His firm, The Gustine Co., also manages an additional 13 properties owned by other companies and has a long-standing arrangement with The Armstrong Group of Companies that allows Gustine to pursue new development projects with Armstrong’s money.
Among Gustine’s recent projects are a new Marshall headquarters for Fore Systems, a new Washington County headquarters for AEG and the renovation of a Downtown building for General Nutrition Companies’ headquarters.
Throughout the 1990s, Gustine was notoriously quiet about its work, reflecting the wishes of the Armstrong Group.
“Some people don’t know who we are,” said Gregg Baldwin, president of The Gustine Co.
But people certainly knew Gustine’s father.
A well-known Pirates player in the 1940s, Frank Gustine Sr. played all four infield positions and made the All-Star team three times. He retired at 30, following a double hernia operation. “I never was a great baseball player,” his father once said. “I always was a plugger with enough ability to get by.”
After his playing days, Gustine opened a restaurant in Oakland that became a gathering place for athletes, writers and broadcasters. He also dabbled in real estate, owning stakes in a Green Tree Holiday Inn and the Sheraton Station Square. He and riverboat executive John Connelly were partners in the Sheraton when Gustine died in 1991.
It was Gustine’s father who loaned his oldest son $10,000 to start The Gustine Co. in 1984.
“Obviously, Dad had a good reputation and was well liked here,” Gustine said. “I think that has helped open a lot of doors.”
But Puntil said the father’s name “only gets you inside the door. Eventually, you have to perform on your own and stand on your own.”
Gustine started his firm after eight years with Oliver Realty and two years with a mortgage banking firm. One of his first assignments was to lease One Mellon Center, the towering Grant Street office building. Another early job was to be the general manager of the bankrupt corporations that built and owned most of the 515-acre Borough of Seven Fields in Butler County.
His business began to grow in 1988, when he merged with Baldwin’s company, adding 500,000 square feet and 11 properties to his portfolio. That same year, he also reached the agreement with Armstrong and its multimillionaire owner, Jud Sedwick, that allowed Gustine to get more aggressive at a time the rest of the real estate industry was turning sour.
Having Armstrong as its backer allowed Gustine to buy and develop office buildings, shopping complexes and distribution centers, purchase a portion of Station Square and renovate an old Gimbels warehouse on the South Side, where Gustine now keeps its headquarters.
The Armstrong relationship also allowed Gustine to reach an agreement with the CVS pharmacy chain that has resulted in 15 new stores in Western Pennsylvania in the last 21/2 years.
But the CVS relationship also caused Gustine some problems.
A decision to build CVS a 10,000-square-foot pharmacy in Homestead, along Eighth Avenue, opened wounds that have yet to heal. Gustine first proposed the deal in 1998. Homestead council took at least seven votes on the project, reversing itself several times. It approved the plan in September 1999, but then denied its borough manager authorization to sign off on the plan.
Preservationists opposed the store, arguing that the buildings on Homestead’s Main Street be saved.
Three years of arguments and four lawsuits followed, capped by a $7 million suit filed by CVS and Gustine this year in U.S. District Court. The suit claimed 17 project opponents conspired to deprive CVS and Gustine of their civil rights to build the pharmacy.
The $7 million suit “is an act that astonishes me in its unfairness,” said Arthur Ziegler, president of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks, one of the defendants in the suit and a former partner of Gustine’s at Station Square.
When asked if he had any regrets about the Homestead situation, Gustine said, ” I would love to answer that, but I really can’t. It is a very sensitive issue. There are a lot of misconceptions about the whole thing.”
Gustine officials think they can survive this, though.
“I really don’t think it has had that much affect on our name or our ability to proceed,” Baldwin said. “We haven’t felt a backlash because of it.”
The Profile
The Gustine Co.Business: Commercial real estate development. Helps clients with land acquisition, entitlements, zoning, office and retail development, construction management, finance, leasing, property management and brokerage.
Headquarters: South Side
History: Founded in 1984 by Frank Gustine Jr. Currently owns 24 properties totaling 3.9 million square feet. It manages 13 properties owned by other companies. It has a subsidiary called WJG Contracting Inc. that operates as an independent construction firm. Projects include Fore Systems headquarters, GNC’s Downtown headquarters, AEG’s Southpointe headquarters and 15 new stores for CVS Corp. It soon plans to open retail centers in Baltimore and Tampa.
Employees: 42
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette