Markham Drive in Mount Lebanon is not yet included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District, but it ought to be. It is a street of architecturally distinctive houses, mostly from the 1930s, that are in an extraordinarily fine state of preservation, at least externally. We have already seen one of them: the “Transition House” designed by Brandon Smith to entice conservative home-buyers to accept modern construction methods. Here is a generous album from the rest of the street.
What, you may ask, is a “transition house”? It is a house designed to look traditional but use the most modern construction methods available in 1936. The idea was that the public could be induced to accept modern construction if it came without the modernist offenses against traditional aesthetics. Architect Brandon Smith—best remembered for some extravagant mansions in Fox Chapel—gave it all the decorative flourishes a 1930s suburbanite might expect from a “Colonial,” but under the stone and brick were super-modern materials developed at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research.
Our information and the architect’s drawing above come from an article about the house in the Pittsburgh Press, published when the house was under construction in 1936. The whole article will interest a few architectural historians, so we have transcribed it below.
All the older schools in Mount Lebanon were designed by Ingham & Boyd, and here we see a fine example of their style. An Ingham & Boyd school is an implied guarantee that your children will grow up to be respectable citizens. The buildings are in a restrained classical style, with just enough ornament to show that good money was spent on this structure. This particular school is named for a poet who was a big deal in the early twentieth century and has been almost completely forgotten since then.
Sunset Hills is a Mount Lebanon plan developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the houses are more modest than the ones in Mission Hills or Beverly Heights. Many of them, however, are fine designs by their architects, and in particular several are among the best examples of the Spanish Mission style in Pittsburgh.
Does your garden shed match the architecture of your house? And does it have two floors?
This house is almost a traditional Pennsylvania farmhouse, but with Mission arched porch and stucco.
Crescent Drive is just a block and a half long, but it has the broad assortment of styles that makes the whole Beverly Heights plan such a delight to wander in. Here’s an album of houses on the street.
We’ve seen some of the houses in Seminole Hills already, but we need no excuse to look at a few more. Like the other similar plans in Mount Lebanon, this one delights us with its wide variety of excellent designs.
A demonstration of the variety of scales found in Mission Hills. Above, a grand mansion with a whole village of outbuildings; below, just around the corner, a modest but richly stony Cape Cod.
This typical Colonial, probably from the 1930s, has a typical little round window above the front door. But what do you do if you don’t want a window there anymore?
As Father Pitt has remarked more than once, the variety and quality of designs in the Mount Lebanon plans like Mission Hills are constantly delightful. Here is a short stroll down Parkway Drive in Mission Hills.
This one, unusually for the neighborhood, has had paste-on shutters applied to add sophistication to the home. Our friend Dr. Boli wrote an essay about those that generated some interesting responses from his correspondents.
Here is one that has real shutters, with hinges and everything.
Old Pa Pitt is always pleased when an architect understands that a house is a three-dimensional object, not just a façade with a box behind it, and gives it rewardingly different appearances from different angles.
And, finally, here is a bit of good news for the neighborhood and the metropolis:
This new house is replacing a house that vanished a few years ago (for reasons unknown to Father Pitt, who does not always keep up with the news, and perhaps a neighbor can inform us). It has reached the stage where we can judge the design, and it is a good one. Individually it may never be Father Pitt’s favorite house, but as a citizen of the neighborhood it gets everything right. It is of similar height and size to its neighbors, and it honors the historic styles around it—look at those three-over-one Craftsman-style windows—while still being distinctly its own 21st-century self, just as all the other houses in Mission Hills are distinct and original. This is a demonstration of how new buildings can be added to historic neighborhoods.
