Broad Street is one of the two main streets of central Sewickley. It is lined with public buildings (churches, post office, school) and a wide variety of houses. This dignified Queen Anne is a good introduction to the street.
This center-hall frame house has been remodeled to someone’s ideal of picture-postcard Victorian perfection. Until a few years ago, it was asymmetrical and had no front porch or Victorian Gothic peak in the front.
A center-hall Georgian house of the early twentieth century, probably built as the manse for the Methodist church next door.
An elegant Second Empire house whose porch wraps around to become a porte cochère.
A beautiful shingle-style mansion belonging to St. Stephen’s Anglican Church next door.
There are also some modest houses among the mansions, like this charming little I-house with real wood siding.
Pine Road is a short street in a very tony section of Sewickley. Here are two fine houses in very different styles. First we have an Italianate house, probably dating from the 1880s or so.
Here is an elegant Dutch colonial with a fine growth of ivy on one of its chimneys.
The most striking feature (in two senses of the word “striking”) of this church is the great clock tower, which gives time to the whole village. In fact, the borough took over responsibility for maintaining the clock, as the church tells us in its page of Village Clock Tower Facts. The tower was finished in 1884, and in 1996 a thorough rebuilding was finished that included a new electronic clock to replace the replacement clock that had replaced the original clock many decades previously.
Even though it is on the grounds of a parish that is still open, with a school that is still open, this glorious Second Empire building is abandoned and crumbling, with scraggly Trees of Heaven—the badge of abandonment—taking root all around it. In its current state it looks like a drawing by Charles Addams.
This is one of the few remaining churches designed by Joseph W. Kerr, who was one of our top architects in the middle 1800s (he also designed the Shields Chapel nearby in Edgeworth). It opened in 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War.
In Father Pitt’s opinion, Mr. Kerr had good taste. Both this church and the Shields Chapel belong to the middle nineteenth century, but they were never embarrassingly out of date; to the last gasp of the Gothic style in America a hundred years later, an architect familiar with the idiom would have found this a pleasing and successful design.
It is fortunate that the congregation has the money to keep the glorious steeple in excellent shape…
There’s that name again: Charette, indicating to the initiated that something architecturally interesting is going on. A “charette,” as we mentioned when we visited Charette Way downtown, is architects’ slang for a session of intense work to meet a deadline, and the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club for many years was called The Charette.
Charette Place is a small one-street subdivision in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, developed by the firm of Ackley & Bradley in 1941. When it was new, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described it as “unique in that the plot is owned and the homes are planned, built and sold by the architects.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 13, 1941.
These are pleasant little houses, not towering works of genius. They do what they’re supposed to do: they make up a street of economical homes where each house is different, but all go together. Though most of them have gone through various alterations, the neighborhood keeps its unified character.
