Linden Avenue in Point Breeze filled up fairly slowly from the 1880s on, and it has always been a desirable neighborhood, so it is a museum of good domestic architecture from many different eras. The wide variety of houses makes it a very pleasant street for an afternoon stroll. We have already seen the Frank Alden house and the Joseph Langfitt mansion; here are some more Linden Avenue houses from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Frank Alden of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow (later just Alden & Harlow, after the partners agreed to divide up the business) designed this house for himself; it was built in 1890, when most of Linden Avenue was vacant. As we might expect, he lavished attention on the details. It surprised old Pa Pitt to discover that there were no pictures of the house in Wikimedia Commons. That lacuna has now been filled.
It is a legal principle that a man’s home is his castle. The attorney Joseph Langfitt took that principle quite seriously. Charles J. Rieger designed this stony turreted and battlemented mansion for him, which indicates that his client was prospering in his profession when it was built in 1901.
For those who are interested or obsessive enough to care, here is the chain of evidence that identified the architect for us.
A Hopkins plat map from 1904 shows the house, which does not appear on earlier maps, as owned by M. A. Langfitt.
Since Langfitt is an unusual name, old Pa Pitt guessed that he might have some luck finding it in construction listings, and indeed his first search in the old reliable Philadelphia Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide found exactly what he was looking for.
Record & Guide, March 28, 1900, p. 200.
Joseph A. Langfitt, attorney at law, has bought a building site on Linden avenue, East end, and will improve it by the erection of a handsome dwelling to cost about $15,000.
The initials M. A. on the map probably belong to Mrs. Langfitt, since property was often put in the name of the wife. To confirm that this is our Langfitt, we looked in the 1904 Social Register, where we find “Langfitt Mr & Mrs Jos A” at this address.
Record & Guide, October 24, 1900, p. 687.
Charles J. Rieger, Smith Building, has prepared plans for a dwelling to be erected for J. Langfitt, and will receive estimates for its construction about November 1st.
Record & Guide, December 5, 1905, p. 795.
Charles Rieger, Smith Building,…is receiving estimates for the erection of a stone veneered dwelling to be erected on Linden avenue for Attorney Langfitt.
This picturesque church, built for the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1930, still serves its original congregation, now under the name “The New Church.” The architect was Harold Thorpe Carswell, who had been an apprentice of Ralph Adams Cram; to judge by the few references to him on line, this is one of his best-known works. Few Pittsburghers ever see it, however, because it sits at the end of a one-block dead-end residential street in Point Breeze.
The inscription, in florid medievalistic lettering, reads, “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—an abridged quotation from Swedenborg, which we may translate as “Now we are permitted to enter into the hidden things of the faith.”
The attached school is in a complementary Tudor style.
A while ago, Father Pitt took a walk on Thomas Boulevard in the light rain, so don’t be surprised to see raindrops in some of these pictures. Thomas Boulevard, like McPherson Boulevard, has an eclectic mixture of housing from duplexes through Shingle-style mansions to medium-sized apartment buildings. Today we’re concentrating on the houses, some of which are magnificent. Above, a Shingle-style house with all its shingles in place.
If you ever asked yourself how much difference materials really make in the appearance of a house, compare this Shingle-style house, where the shingles have been replaced with fake siding and paste-on shutters, to the one above.
A typical Pittsburgh Renaissance palace that has turned into an apartment building.
A house with Queen Anne outlines that has been modernized with reasonably good taste.
This frame house was in deplorable condition before it was updated and made to look like a product of the twenty-first century. You can look on Google Street View to see the specific meaning old Pa Pitt assigns to “deplorable.” With an unlimited budget, Father Pitt would prefer to restore a house like this to its original design. With a limited budget, this was a good result.
This turret with house attached needs some rescuing. It has what the real-estate people call good bones, and that turret ought to be attractive to a well-off eccentric now that the neighborhood is on the upswing.
A big center-hall house that is now solar-powered.
A stony foursquare with Queen Anne details. It has lost its porch, but the third floor retains fine original woodwork and windows.
A center-hall colonial from early in the Colonial Revival, when Georgian was filtered through a late-Victorian lens.
This is a variation on the same plan as the previous house, which is right next to it; they were probably built at the same time and designed by the same hand. The porch has been replaced with a modern construction that does not quite fit, but the house looks much better with this porch than it would look with no porch at all.
This towering center-hall manse makes spectacular use of Kittanning brick in Frederick Sauer’s favorite color. The beefiness of it, along with the well-balanced selection of picturesque details, makes us think that Sauer is a good suspect for the architect.
This house grew a large balcony when it was turned into a duplex.
A big square house with typical Queen Anne details, especially the little balcony and the curved surfaces covered with shingles.
This is a typical Pittsburgh Foursquare, but with an oversized dormer that gives it a good bit of extra space on the third floor.
Acute-angled intersections are common in Pittsburgh, and in business districts they produce some odd-shaped buildings. This one in Point Breeze has been tastefully modernized with an eye for what is most distinctive about it. The oriel over the entrance on the corner is especially appealing.
This stone house makes a fine impression as you walk by on Reynolds Street. If you just glanced at it, you might miss a very unusual feature: the corner windows in the front bedrooms on the second floor. Corner windows were very popular for a while in the middle twentieth century in modernist residences: they had the very practical purpose of leaving large expanses of wall blank for furniture or decorations. But it is not common to see them on a house that probably dates from about 1900.
This house probably dates from the 1870s, making it much earlier than the city neighborhood that filled in around it. Because Point Breeze is such a desirable neighborhood (this house is just around the corner from the Frick Art Museum), it has been worth the expense to restore this house to something like its original appearance.
This looks exactly like the gateway to a world of sylvan rest and rustic pleasure that it was meant to be. In passing we note that the gatehouse is actually a building, with a room on either side of the gate: we used to have staff to sit here and tend to park visitors’ needs.
The architect was a big deal for such a small structure: John Russell Pope. He had some famous commissions in Washington (that’s Big Worshington to residents of the South Hills): the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery of Art, Constitution Hall, and the National Archives, among other buildings. In Pittsburgh he is best known for the colossal Winter mausoleum at Allegheny Cemetery.
Henry Clay Frick really liked the Phipps Conservatory in Schenley Park when it went up in 1892. He liked it so well that he said, “I want one of those in my back yard,” and hired Alden & Harlow to design it. (You can do that when you’re a robber baron.) They gave him a miniature of Phipps Conservatory, with a central greenhouse large enough for substantial citrus trees.
These pictures were taken in March of 2000 with a Kodak Pony 135.
