These double duplexes represent a common phenomenon in the streetcar neighborhoods that developed around the turn of the twentieth century. They were built for C. M. Neeld in 1916 on land that his family had owned for generations. When the streetcar line was pushed through from downtown in 1905, the Neelds found that their old family homes were right on the car line, and thus right in the path of speedy development. They profited by developing some of their land, but they kept a whole city block for themselves until after the Second World War. These apartments—twelve of them in three buildings—would have turned some of the vacant land into a good steady income that couldn’t be matched by the small farming the Neelds had probably done before the streetcars came.
Father Pitt guesses that the architect was William Arthur Thomas, who favored this white face brick and designed other similar duplexes in Beechview.1
The lowest of the three preserves its original details best. The one at the top of the slope has been altered the most, with mid-twentieth-century “picture” windows replacing the original much larger windows.
The one in the middle preserves these original small windows in the stairwells.
- In a long list of construction projects in the Gazette Times, February 22, 1916, we find this notice: “Plans are being prepared…by C. M. Neeld for three two-story and frame double-duplex houses in Neeld avenue, Beechview, about $35,000; by W. A. Thomas for two blocks of duplex dwellings in Mckee Place for Harry and Phillip Goldberg, about $30,000…” C. M. Neeld was not an architect, as far as we know, so the report is slightly garbled; but it would make sense if two projects by Thomas were mentioned together, with the name of the client accidentally substituted for the architect in one of them. ↩︎
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