St. Clair Terrace is another housing plan laid out in the 1920s, with many of the houses built then or in the next decade. It’s included in the Mt. Lebanon Historic District. Here we have some houses on St. Clair Place.
Now a few of the houses on Roycroft Avenue, including some imaginative ones.
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There are a couple of interesting used-to-bes about this frame duplex in Brookline. First, it used to be St. Mark’s English Lutheran Church: it was built before 1910, when the neighborhood was first being developed. In 1929, the church moved several blocks away to a new stone building designed by O. M. Topp, and this was converted to a double house.
Second, although the building stands on Bodkin Street now, it used to be on Brookline Boulevard. It was not the building that moved, however: the street moved out from under it. Brookline Boulevard used to go down toward West Liberty Avenue in a straight line from the top of the hill, but the grade was too steep for streetcars, which were routed in their own right-of-way that made a long curve down the hill. When the streetcar line to Brookline was abandoned, the western section of Brookline Boulevard, from Pioneer to West Liberty Avenues, was routed over the abandoned streetcar right-of-way, and the old Brookline Boulevard was renamed Bodkin Street.
It looks as though this commercial block in Sharpsburg was built in two stages. The date stone would have been in the center of the original building, making a neatly symmetrical composition; it might have had some eruption of ornament behind it where the blank spot is in the cornice. Later, the building was extended by two bays to the right, nearly identical in design, but breaking the symmetry, and without the terra-cotta ornaments between the second and third floors. It also appears that the bricks are very slightly different in color, perhaps from a different source.
The date stone would have told us when the original building was put up, but at some point a new owner decided to obliterate the evidence of the old one.
At least the terra-cotta decorations remain.
Sharpsburg has a shortage of street names. There is Main Street, and North Main Street, and South Main Street; and North Canal Street and South Canal Street and Short Canal Street. The town is crammed into a tiny narrow strip along the Allegheny, but it is still easy to get lost.
Father Pitt continues documenting the domestic architecture of the Pittsburgh area, in the hope that some of his readers will begin to appreciate the character of the neighborhoods they live in.
Broadway in Dormont is the boulevard where the streetcars run in the median. That makes it a prominent street, and on one side some of the better-off citizens of the middle-class borough built houses on a lavishly upper-middle-class scale. The Tudor house above has had its porch enclosed, which disguises what would have been an interesting design with an overhanging second-floor sunroom. (Update: Note the comment from a kind correspondent who has pleasant memories of this house when the porch was still there.)
This one has had vinyl siding applied with fairly good taste, but it would originally have been shingled above the ground floor.
Here we have arts-and-crafts style applied to the standard Pittsburgh Foursquare arrangement. The wood trim has been replaced with aluminum; there would probably have been prominent carved brackets to add to the arts-and-crafts appeal.
The archetypal Pittsburgh Foursquare.
When these houses were built, the big attraction of this street was its direct trolley link to downtown Pittsburgh.
That is still true today.
Here is a hint for institutions finding themselves in possession of distinguished historic buildings that are crumbling a bit at the cornice: when the low-bidding contractor says, “Sure, I can fix that…”
…see what the second-lowest-bidding contractor has to offer.
The building is still in use as a school, now for special education. We note that it has been modified to suit the modern discovery that natural light poisons children’s blood.
Navahoe Drive is just outside the Mount Lebanon Historic District, but it is lined with architecturally significant houses, mostly from the 1930s. It is a curious thing that there was something of a boom in homebuilding in the Depression years. Labor rates were low, so the conventional wisdom was that, if you could afford a home, you would get more for your money by building a new one than by buying an older one. Thus there were many empty houses owned by banks that had foreclosed on them and could not dispose of them, but also many new houses going up, sometimes in the same neighborhoods.
We have quite a few more houses beyond the “more” link.
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Now the Keystone Flats apartments, this building was put up in the 1890s, and that is about all old Pa Pitt knows about it. It’s a good example of the Rundbogenstil, straddling the line between Romanesque and Renaissance.
In most cities, Third Avenue would be called an alley, so it is nearly impossible to get a picture like this. It cannot be done without a lot of fudging, so you will notice slightly different colors in different parts of the picture. But it does give us a good idea of the design.
