Father Pitt

Category: Allegheny West

  • McIntosh Row, Allegheny West

    McIntosh Row

    This row of houses is not architecturally spectacular, but it represents something important in the history of Pittsburgh. Originally built in 1865, it was restored in the 1970s by a neighborhood association. Allegheny West set an example of cooperative preservation that has made the neighborhood the attractive place to live it is today, and other neighborhoods took note.

    Perspective view

    Originally there were six of these houses. They had all decayed badly, but it was the demolition of the two on the end that provoked the Allegheny West Civic Council to act. It was one of the turning points in Pittsburgh history. Would the city become a sea of parking lots surrounding a few big attractions, or would we find clever ways to keep some of the good things we had?

    You can read the history of Allegheny West’s successes and failures on the Recent History of Allegheny West page at the Allegheny West site. The story of the McIntosh Row is in Part 5; the site design is too clever by half, so it is not possible to link to that part directly.

  • Second Empire House, Allegheny West

    827 North Lincoln Avenue

    One of the grandest of the Second Empire houses in Allegheny West, this one has an elaborate cornice with delightfully folksy wood-carving.

    Cornice
    Corner
    Second Empire mansion in Allegheny West

  • Calvary Methodist Church at Night

    Calvary United Methodist Church at night

    Calvary Methodist Church in Allegheny West is floodlit at night, and old Pa Pitt stopped the other night to get a few pictures. The design of this church is credited to Vrydaugh & Shepherd with T. B. Wolfe. Vrydaugh & Wolfe would soon become a partnership designing a number of fine churches and millionaires’ mansions. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened to Shepherd.

    West front
    West front
    Entrance
    Calvary United Methodist Church

    These pictures were all taken hand-held with very slow shutter speeds. Photographers will tell you that you cannot take a sharp hand-held picture at 1/10 of a second. What they mean is that you cannot reliably take a sharp picture. With digital photography, where individual pictures cost nothing, what you can do is take a dozen or two pictures and hope that one of them will be sharp.

  • Harry Darlington House, Allegheny West

    Harry Darlington house

    This grand mansion was built in about 1890 for railroad magnate Harry Darlington. It occupies a tiny lot, so it is one room wide—but four storeys tall and half a block deep.

    Perspective view

    The building is decorated with numerous terra-cotta tiles with fine scrolly foliage.

    Terra cotta
    More terra cotta
    Terra cotta and arches
    Harry Darlington house from the rear

    A carriage house in the back has matching stony foundations.

  • Italianate Houses in Allegheny West

    Italianate houses on North Lincoln Avenue

    This pair of houses is obscured by trees all through the leafy months, but in the winter we can appreciate the simple but tasteful Italianate details.

    The difference in bricks suggests that the third floor was added later, but still early enough that the Italianate details were matched exactly.

  • Joseph & Elizabeth Horne House, Allegheny West

    Joseph O. Horne house

    An early work of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow in Pittsburgh, this house was given the Carol J. Peterson treatment, so that it has its own little book of its history. Old Pa Pitt will not repeat everything the late Ms. Peterson found out about it, but this is the outline: Joseph O. Horne, son of the department-store baron, married Elizabeth Jones, daughter of the steel baron B. F. Jones, and her father had Longfellow, Alden & Harlow design this cozy little Romanesque house for the young couple. It was one of the many houses restored in the late twentieth century by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, and now it looks pretty much the way the architects drew it, minus some erosion and a century of soot.

    Dormer decoration

    The decoration on the dormer is a bit eroded, but that probably makes it more picturesque than it was when the house was new.

    Joseph O. Horne House

  • Graham–Teufel House, Allegheny West

    840 Lincoln Avenue

    This house has an unusual history, which we take from Carol Peterson’s detailed research at the Allegheny West site. It was built in the early 1860s as a typical modest Pittsburgh rowhouse. In 1918, new owners decided they wanted something less embarrassingly old-fashioned, so they hired the most modern and up-to-date architects—Kiehnel & Elliott—to remodel the house in the most modern and up-to-date style—Spanish Mission. The result is something that would have been right at home in Florida, where Kiehnel and Elliott were beginning a flourishing practice that would persuade them to move to Miami in 1922. It would also have matched the neighborhood aesthetic in many of the new Pittsburgh streetcar suburbs like Carrick or Beechview. It seems a little out of place on Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West.

    Graham–Teufel House

  • Hoffstot House, Allegheny West

    Hoffstot House on Lincoln Avenue

    Like many of the houses in Allegheny West, this grand Second Empire house had a detailed history prepared by the late Carol Peterson, so old Pa Pitt will tell you only that it was built in 1880 for Gideon and Mary Hoffstot, and for the rest we can let Ms. Peterson take over.

  • Entrance to the Kinder Building, Allegheny West

    The Kinder Building is a little Beaux-Arts masterpiece at the corner of Western Avenue and Galveston Avenue. At night its carefully balanced classical entrance takes on a pleasing air of mystery.

  • Neon in Allegheny West

    Modern Cafe spelled out in neon

    The Modern Cafe is a little outcropping of late Art Deco in Allegheny West that looks as though it belongs in a hardboiled detective movie or an Edward Hopper painting.