Many fine rowhouses like this one adorn the South Side, but once in a while we find one where the owners who restored the house have looked up its history and encapsulated it on a plaque. This is one of them, so we know that the house was built in 1891 for Charlotte and Wilhelm Geauf, and that the building cost $3,000 on a lot that cost $2,000. Note the fine parlor window—always the best opportunity for showing off in a rowhouse like this—and the richly textured brick cornice.
Sarah Street was the prime residential street of East Birmingham (the part of the South Side between 17th and 26th Streets), and it retains some of Pittsburgh’s most distinguished rowhouses. The one above is a splendidly eclectic mix—a bit of Italianate, a bit of Gothic, a bit of Second Empire. Note how much effort has gone into making interesting patterns in the bricks.
Here is another house in a similarly eclectic style. The parlor window is treated almost identically, but the upper floors vary the theme considerably.
This is not strictly a rowhouse, since it is detached from its neighbors by a narrow alley on each side; but since it is connected to those neighbors by a pair of gates, it is as near a rowhouse as makes no difference. This is a fine example of the Italianate style in a city house, and the owners have had some fun picking out the ornamental details with an unusual but effective paint scheme.
This is now the Carson City Saloon, because everything on the South Side eventually becomes a bar. But the whole building shouts “bank.” It’s built from classical elements like a Venetian Renaissance palace.
Addendum: The architect was the prolific Charles Bickel.1
The date stone tells us that the bank was put up in 1896, with palm fronds signifying victory, and anti-pigeon spikes signifying “We hate pigeons.”
This ornamental ironwork is meant to evoke the balconies on a Renaissance palace, without actually being useful as a balcony.
What is there to see in one block of rowhouses on one back street on the South Side? Old Pa Pitt asked that question, and then got out a camera to answer it. Here are a few little details from the 2200 block of Sarah Street.
And, of course, because this is Pittsburgh…
Kool-Vent awnings.
This was the blast in a blast furnace: the machine that provided the air that rushed into the furnace to keep the chemical reactions going. Surprisingly, this one was not used in Pittsburgh: it was brought down from Sharpsville, a little steel town in Mercer County. But it was built by the Mesta Machine Company in West Homestead. Now it lives at Station Square, right in front of the Glasshouse apartments.
A very Pittsburghish view: a cluttered urban streetscape, seen under a railroad viaduct, with an entirely different neighborhood (in this case Oakland) on the inaccessible hill in the distance.
Remarkable mostly for its unremarkableness, this little house in the back streets of the South Side is a good demonstration of how to keep an old house (it might be 150 years old or more) tastefully up to date.
From the blocked-up Gothic windows and general shape, we can infer that this was a small church. But at some point not very recently it was converted to four tiny alley houses, made only slightly less tiny by the addition of what are probably kitchens on the back. (Update: For the history of the church, see “The Mystery of the Converted Church on the South Side.”)
Both could use a little spiffing up, but they are fine examples of the Victorian commercial architecture for which Carson Street is famous.
Little mineral stalactites dangle from the railroad overpass over 21st Street, South Side.
