A particularly fine house built in the 1880s and lovingly restored. It had the good luck to be just missed by the Ohio River Boulevard when it tore through the heart of Manchester.
Picturesquely wavy shingles still decorate the gable.
Not surprisingly, considering the fashion that Richardson’s courthouse set throughout the Pittsburgh area, this house has more than a touch of the Romanesque. Note the former address, 22, carved in stone.
A more modern architect might ask, “Why is there an oval window?” But in the Queen Anne style, which is devoted to the picturesque, the proper question to ask is, “Why should there not be an oval window?”
A few weeks ago old Pa Pitt took a wintry walk on North Avenue (which used to be Fayette Street back when it did not run all the way through to North Avenue on the rest of the North Side). He took piles of pictures, and although he published four articles so far from that walk (one, two, three, four), there’s still quite a collection backed up waiting to be published. Thus this very long article, which is a smorgasbord of Victorian domestic architecture with a few other eras thrown in. Above, a pair of Italianate houses. They both preserve the tall windows typical of the high Italianate style; the one on the right still has (or has restored) its two-over-two panes.
Isaac Wertheimer, who made his money in the distilling business, had this house built in 1892. The late Carol Peterson wrote a detailed history of the house (PDF), though she did not find the name of the architect. Whoever it was created a romantic composition in the up-to-date Queen Anne style, with the peculiarity that the house appears from the front to be a good bit smaller than it actually is. A view of the side reveals three and a half floors of picturesque angles and projections.
The Second Empire style is a good fit for high-class rowhouses, because it was created specifically to stuff the most usable volume into the least taxable building. Supposedly it came about because houses in France of Napoleon III’s time were taxed by the area of the rooms, but attics were not counted in the calculation. All the space above the roofline was dismissed as attic by the law; therefore, if the roof could bulge out to make an attic the same size as the other floors, you got an extra floor tax-free. Americans adopted the style because they liked the way it looked and the way it solved the practical problems of space.
This row of seven houses drops a few feet after the first three. Manchester is a flat neighborhood, but only by Pittsburgh standards. Old maps show that the row was built between 1872 and 1882.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100;
A very clever detective might deduce that these pictures were taken on two different visits.
Manchester is known for its splendid brick Victorian houses, but there are blocks of more modest houses as well—often older than the big brick ones. Here is a row of neat little frame houses, some of which appear—from both old maps and the style of the houses—to date back to the Civil War era.
Queen Anne is an expansive style, with turrets and bays and oriels and all kinds of picturesque projections this way and that. When Queen Anne is compressed to the dimensions of a rowhouse, it takes on some of the vocabulary of the Second Empire style, in particular the full third floor under a mansard roof, but adds the irregularity we expect from Queen Anne, with its asymmetry and, of course, its turrets. These two houses on North Avenue are splendidly preserved examples of the collision of the two styles.
The far end of Manchester still has some work to do. A few houses have been restored; about an equal number are abandoned and condemned. A few have been restored, and then abandoned and condemned. A few have been renovated in a way that seems regrettable. We can only hope that someone will rescue the houses that need rescuing.
It is always especially sad when we see that the last thing residents were able to do to their house was decorate it for Christmas.
Here we have a frame house refurbished to be habitable and comfortable. “Multipane” windows were used, of course, because is there any other kind? (Old Pa Pitt was shocked to visit a house with modern “multipane” windows and discover that the “panes” are really just cartoon lines drawn in plastic across a single sheet of glass.)
This house suffered a fire years ago and appears to have been abandoned since then. At least some minimal work has been done to stabilize it. The dormer is distinctive; it would have been more so with its original decorative woodwork.
We find some of the houses in better shape as we approach the western end of the street.
Columbus Avenue is at the ragged back end of Manchester, where there are still many crumbling and abandoned buildings. This one, however, has been beautifully restored; it is the home of a marketing company that obviously sees the value in having a landmark building for its headquarters.
