Stone below and shingle above—a popular combination in the 1920s, but almost all such houses have had their shingles replaced with artificial siding. On this house in Dormont, however, the shingles remain. The roof and windows are newer replacements, but otherwise this house stands just about as it was originally built.
Note how the basement garage door is carefully matched to the rest of the house.
William P. Hutchins was the architect of this church, built in 1924. It takes its inspiration from ancient Roman basilicas, with a light overlay of Art Nouveau. Most architectural historians would probably just say “Romanesque” and leave it at that, but it is a more interesting building when we recognize its ancient sources.
California’s gold and Pennsylvania’s oil were the two great booms of the 1800s. The Gold Rush gets all the glamorous stories, because gold is shiny and oil is dark and slimy. But oil made bigger fortunes. According to Wikipedia, oil production in Pennsylvania peaked in 1891. Well into the twentieth century, it was common to see oil derricks even in back yards in suburban towns. “Oil Wells in Moon Township” at the Moon Township Historical Society has some personal memories of the oil industry in Moon Township.
Robin Hill Park preserves some memories of the oil industry, which you can easily visit if you walk down the access road behind the Robin Hill mansion.
Some of the pictures in this article are enormous, with more than 20 megabytes of data if you enlarge them. Be careful on a metered connection. We are trying out a Samsung cell phone with a 50-megapixel camera. The results are okay. It will not replace good cameras, but it gives us more pixels to crop out in an emergency cell-phone picture.
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Only because no one else would do it, here is a composite picture of the entire Florida Avenue face of this high-rise apartment block. In the fifteen minutes he devoted to the search, old Pa Pitt was not able to find evidence of the architect; but it has Tasso Katselas written all over it. (Update: Father Pitt confirmed this attribution by asking the architect himself, which is almost like cheating. Mr. Katselas tells us that it was a difficult project because the budget was very tight.)
We also have pictures of the Washington Road side of Washington Square.
At first glance this looks like a postmodernist building from the 1980s, and your first instinct is half right. It was originally an early ten-storey skyscraper built for the Shields Rubber Company in 1903. In 1989, it got a heavy postmodern makeover, with an extra floor at the top.
These views are made possible by the demolition of the buildings along the east side of Market Street.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix Hs10.
Left to right: the Benedum-Trees Building (built 1905 as the Machesney Building, architect Thomas Scott); the Investment Building (1927, John M. Donn); and the Arrott Building (1902, Frederick Osterling).
You see them everywhere in Pittsburgh neighborhoods: those big cube-shaped houses with a pyramid roof, a house-wide porch, and a big dormer facing the front.
This is the Pittsburgh Foursquare, the local variety of the American Foursquare. It was a style especially popular, with variations, in the years from about 1890 to about 1930.
These houses are called “foursquare” because they look square, and the ground floor usually has four rooms, counting the reception hall with the grand staircase, which in those civilized days was often the largest room in the house. The stairway usually had a landing with a big art-glass window to impress visitors.
These windows often go missing—sometimes because they are stolen if the house is vacant for a while, and sometimes because, in the middle twentieth century, it was so embarrassingly old-fashioned to have stained glass in one’s house that people either covered the windows with heavy curtains or replaced them with something more in line with modern taste, like glass block. Nevertheless, there are thousands of them still in place in Pittsburgh houses.
On the second floor were three or four bedrooms and a bathroom (and usually a linen closet the size of a small room). The third floor generally had two more full-sized rooms, which might be used as servants’ quarters.
The most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh version is usually a steeper pitch of the roof, allowing more space in the two rooms on the third floor and giving the houses a taller and beefier appearance than the Midwestern varieties of the species. It is also true that the Pittsburgh version is designed to make the best use of narrow city lots, giving the homeowner as much “detached” house as can be squashed into a lot typically thirty feet wide. For that reason, Pittsburgh Foursquares are usually considerably deeper than they are wide. The design is exceptionally efficient in cramming square footage into a city lot, even allowing for the reception hall, which later generations would consider wasted space.
Whole blocks in streetcar neighborhoods of the early 1900s are lined with these houses.
Though the basic shape varied little, decorative details like the dormer could make the house distinctive.
Pittsburgh Foursquares are built in all materials—frame, brick, stone, and occasionally concrete block.
Cameras: Squirrel Hill, Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Beechview, Canon PowerShot A530; Mount Oliver, Kodak EasyShare Z981.
Glenfield is a tiny borough of about two hundred people in ninety households, most of which are lined up along the Ohio, with another line in the Kilbuck Run valley and a few others scattered through the hillside woods. Here we see some of the houses from Neville Island across the front channel of the Ohio.
