Somehow the line for the Mount Lebanon Historic District was drawn just to the left side of this building, leaving it unhistorical, though taking in a much more pedestrian postwar apartment building across the street. Fortunately, historic district or no historic district, most of the details have been preserved, although the original windows would have added a layer of artistry that their simpler modern replacements lack.
The art glass in the stairwell has been preserved.
The front door is a work of art in itself. Enlarge the picture and admire the door pull.
A long stretch of Shady Drive is lined on the southwest side with two rows of double houses, identical except that one row is built of sand-colored brick and the other of sooty dark red brick. Individually the buildings are attractive examples of the typical small Pittsburgh terrace with Mission-style details; as a whole row, they add up to something more impressive. Light snow was falling when we took these pictures a few days ago.
Some of the houses have had their front yards scooped out to make driveways, and a few have added garages in the basement.
We may take it as admitted that the overhangs that decorate the upstairs windows have no practical use at all, since in half the buildings they hang over the bedroom windows and in the other half those are left naked, with an overhang over the small windows that probably look out from the bathrooms. The decorative crests similarly alternate.
The alternating placement of the overhangs and the crests of the buildings actually creates a more regular rhythm in the row, taking into account the spaces between the buildings.
Sunset Hills is a middle-class plan, compared to the upper-crustier Mission Hills or Beverly Heights, but many of its more modest homes were designed by well-known architects, and they form a museum of middle-class styles of the 1920s and 1930s. Here are just a few houses across from Pine Cone Park, a little triangular parklet at the irregular intersection of Parkside Avenue and Sunset Drive.
We’ve seen some of these houses on Longuevue Drive before; others are making their first appearance here. Father Pitt’s ambition is to document every house in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. If he ever succeeds in balancing that ambition with all his other ambitions, he may get it done. Meanwhile, here are a few beautiful houses to enjoy, and we need no more excuse than that for these pictures.
To avoid weighing down the front page for a week and a half, we’ll put the rest of the pictures below the metaphorical fold.
Cochran Place is a small plan on both sides of Beverly Road next to Cochran Road. These pictures are all from the Cochran Place Addition, which was built up in the late 1920s or early 1930s; all the houses were here by 1934. They are more modest than their near neighbors in Virginia Manor, but they are as rich and varied as any other houses in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. Stone is a very common material here: in fact, stone houses outnumber brick ones in Cochran Place.
In the 1920s and 1930s, designers of houses often made them into fairy-tale cottages, in which every detail was carefully managed to evoke picturesque fantasies of old England or France. But this was also the time when built-in garages were becoming a requirement for suburban homes. If the garage door is on the front, it often spoils the fantasy. But this house in Mission Hills, Mount Lebanon, shows us that there is an alternative: make the garage part of the fantasy.
Not only is the garage entrance a big stone arch that suggests an immemorially ancient cellar under the house, but it is also decorated with the terra-cotta rays that were a fashionable adornment of the fairy-tale style.
Mission Hills is a neighborhood where every house is an individual work of art. It has a special charm in the snow. Here is a short stroll on Orchard Drive, taking in a wide variety of styles.
This house looks quite traditional on the outside, but inside it used the most up-to-date construction methods for 1928. Instead of the ordinary timber framing, it was built on a steel frame like a skyscraper. It was such an innovation that Carnegie Tech architecture students made a field trip to inspect the construction.
Pittsburgh Press, October 14, 1928.
When a technological institute of the standing of Carnegie Tech expresses interest in a construction project to the point of sending a class to inspect the work, then it may be regarded as a certainty that the project is basically sound and worthy.
Forty Tech students, part of whom are shown above, headed by Prof. T. D. Mylrea, assistant to the head of the building construction department of the Institute, last week made a tour of inspection of the new type, steel framed, fire proof home being built in Mission Hills, Mt. Lebanon, for W. H. Shaffer, Jr.
This home, designed by Lyon and Taylor, New York architects, is such a departure from past methods of construction that a number of builders’ and architects’ magazines have published exhaustive articles concerning it. It is primarily a product of Pittsburgh, the National Steel Fabric Co., Steel Frame House Co. and Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. having collaborated with L. Brandt, Pittsburgh housing engineer, in working out the details of construction.
The front of this house in Mission Hills has changed very little since it was new. It was sold in 1930, probably when it was newly built, and the Sun-Telly printed its picture.
“Mission Hills Home,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, June 1, 1930, p. 48
Forgive the blurry microfilm reproduction of what was already a photograph reproduced in halftone on cheap newsprint; it is enough to show us that, except for the filled-in side porch, not much is different in front, although the tiny sapling in the newspaper picture is a major tree now. There appears to be an addition in the back, where it does not alter the impression the house makes from the street.
A week or so ago we saw a fairy-tale palace by Paul Scheuneman in Cedarhurst Manor. That house is perhaps the grandest in the plan, but some others are not far behind. Several other fine houses went up in the 1930s; they must have been even more like fairy-tale palaces in their first years, since much of Cedarhurst Manor was sparsely settled until after the Second World War, and these houses would have loomed suddenly out of the woods. They are in different styles, but they all share that prioritizing of the picturesque that is the hallmark of what Father Pitt calls the fairy-tale style of the 1920s and 1930s. Above and below, what Pittsburghers call a Normandy, with a turret cozily tucked into its corner.
This house is of more modest dimensions, and it is similar to many other houses that went up in the suburbs during the Depression. (Many of them were designed by Joseph Hoover, a prolific producer of fairy-tale cottages who went full-on Moderne when he turned to commercial projects: he was the architect of the first Pittsburgh International Airport.) Here we see how the fairy-tale style has filtered down to the middle of the middle class: you may be limited in your resources, but you can still have the little cottage of your childhood dreams. Father Pitt suspects the half-timbered gable has been simplified from an original that would have had more timber.
