Sunday, April 21, 2019

Minnetonka Building, 5425-5431 Walnut Street

It's been a while, but I have two updates for you today.

The Scheibler house at 2619 Shady Avenue is listed for sale, so I updated its post with new photos of the inside of the house. You can see them here.

And, I recently grabbed some shots of the Minnetonka Building at 5425-5431 Walnut Street in Shadyside. This building is home to Shadyside Variety Store, Mazur Galleries, Cappy’s Cafe, and 8 one-bedroom apartments.

You should start here to see photos and a complete description by Martin Aurand, author of The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr. He writes that the building was designed for Edward C. Wefing, a real estate man with visionary expectations for Walnut Street. When the store and apartment building was erected in 1908, it was one of the most urbane commercial buildings in the entire city, and was by far the grandest structure on a street with only a few shops.

Photograph by Martin Aurand

Aurand writes, "The building’s three-story height, horizontality, and the arrangement of the apartments around two entries recall Scheibler’s Old Heidelberg apartment building; but here the roof is flat, the entries are accented rather than minimized, and there are no suburban amenities like porches and plantings.

White brick yields a hard planar surface on the building’s upper stories and sides. The nearly flush windows (now altered) feature Scheibler’s trademark exposed steel I-beam lintels.  A stucco panel at the center of the facade features half-timbering and narrow green art-glass windows.  Scars remain from a pair of metalwork light fixtures that originally broke the plane of the façade.  Bands of stucco and bowed windows round the corners of the building to unify the front and sides.  Such rounded corner treatments were popular urban devices in contemporary Vienna, and Scheibler may have referred to such buildings in developing his design."

Keep reading here.



Minnetonka Building, 1908

Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr.





Abigail thanks you for reading.

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