You see them everywhere in Pittsburgh neighborhoods: those big cube-shaped houses with a pyramid roof, a house-wide porch, and a big dormer facing the front.
This is the Pittsburgh Foursquare, the local variety of the American Foursquare. It was a style especially popular, with variations, in the years from about 1890 to about 1930.
These houses are called “foursquare” because they look square, and the ground floor usually has four rooms, counting the reception hall with the grand staircase, which in those civilized days was often the largest room in the house. The stairway usually had a landing with a big art-glass window to impress visitors.
These windows often go missing—sometimes because they are stolen if the house is vacant for a while, and sometimes because, in the middle twentieth century, it was so embarrassingly old-fashioned to have stained glass in one’s house that people either covered the windows with heavy curtains or replaced them with something more in line with modern taste, like glass block. Nevertheless, there are thousands of them still in place in Pittsburgh houses.
On the second floor were three or four bedrooms and a bathroom (and usually a linen closet the size of a small room). The third floor generally had two more full-sized rooms, which might be used as servants’ quarters.
The most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh version is usually a steeper pitch of the roof, allowing more space in the two rooms on the third floor and giving the houses a taller and beefier appearance than the Midwestern varieties of the species. It is also true that the Pittsburgh version is designed to make the best use of narrow city lots, giving the homeowner as much “detached” house as can be squashed into a lot typically thirty feet wide. For that reason, Pittsburgh Foursquares are usually considerably deeper than they are wide. The design is exceptionally efficient in cramming square footage into a city lot, even allowing for the reception hall, which later generations would consider wasted space.
Whole blocks in streetcar neighborhoods of the early 1900s are lined with these houses.
Though the basic shape varied little, decorative details like the dormer could make the house distinctive.
Pittsburgh Foursquares are built in all materials—frame, brick, stone, and occasionally concrete block.
Cameras: Squirrel Hill, Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Beechview, Canon PowerShot A530; Mount Oliver, Kodak EasyShare Z981.
