Father Pitt

Why should the beautiful die?

Walter R. Fleming House, Brookline

Broker’s Home in South Hills. Walter R. Fleming now occupies his new home in Pioneer avenue, Nineteenth ward, the house being of brick veneer construction and is a type of a California home. It contains 13 rooms, all finished in hardwood. The dining and living rooms are beamed and panelled. Bookcases, tables, china closets, buffet and seats are all built in. The bedrooms are spacious, and there is a sleeping porch. — Pittsburgh Gazette Times, March 30, 1913.

Walter R. Fleming, a real-estate developer, built himself one of the finest houses in Brookline in 1913. It still stands today, and it’s still a handsome house in spite of multiple alterations, which form a sort of manual of things that can happen to a Pittsburgh house over the course of a century: porches can be filled in, windows can be replaced with different sizes; half-timbered stucco can be covered with aluminum or vinyl; chimneys can be shortened.