This storefront on Brownsville Road has layers of history. The original 1920 building must have been an interesting design; enough remains to show us that somebody tried hard to make it distinctive and up to date.
The ground floor looks like a postwar remodeling, and a well-preserved inscription in the floor of the entrance tells us that it was a shop called Harvard’s.
As Mount Oliver trendifies, this storefront may become more desirable, and if you are the owner of a small business moving in, old Pa Pitt has a suggestion: whatever your business is, call it “Harvard’s.” You then have a ready-made logo, as well as a distinctive sidewalk inscription to welcome your customers. It would be an especially good name for the intellectual sort of used bookstore.
Father Pitt had to stand in the street and risk the wrath of the No. 51 bus to get this picture, but that is the kind of effort he is willing to make for you, his faithful readers.
For two blocks, Bausman Street in Knoxville is lined with these houses, which are modest in their dimensions but unusually fine in their design. There are four basic shapes, which repeat in the same order on both sides of the street.
The houses were built for the Knoxville Land Improvement Company as a speculative venture. Father Pitt has not yet discovered who the architect was, but the developers got their money’s worth from these designs.
Knoxville is a bit tattered around the edges at the moment, and a few of these houses have been lost to the ravages of time and poverty—two forces whose destructive power is surpassed only by the even more destructive force of prosperity. The remaining houses ought to be preserved as a document of the best early-twentieth-century styles in middle-class housing, and because, as a streetscape, they are a work of art.
This charming Arts-and-Crafts Gothic church is the most distinguished building in the little hamlet of Imperial. It was built, according to the date stone, in 1911 for a congregation that had been founded in 1840, and the large cemetery behind the church has tombstones going back to that foundation.
The outstanding feature of the church is its belfry, with simple and massive woodwork that echoes the Gothic arches below, but also flares out into bell shapes, like a Sunday-school-supplement illustration of the bells within.
This tidy little building in the back streets of the near South Side was built as the office for the Pittsburgh Foundry plant. The style brings a bit of Arts-and-Crafts to the usual industrial Romanesque. Note the patterned bricks.
HDR images from a Kodak EasyShare Z1285 set to bracket three exposures at intervals of 1 EV.
Old Pa Pitt was on his way out of West Park and already late for an appointment, but when he passed this house on the McKees Rocks side of the neighborhood, he had to stop and take pictures. It is not quite like any other house he has ever seen, and the original trim is well preserved.
Of the 130 municipalities in Allegheny County, Neville Township is the only one entirely surrounded by water. It is coextensive with Neville Island, the largest river island in the area, which is mostly industrial but has a small town at its western end.
This is a charming little building that would have been even more charming with its original windows, doors, and roof brackets. Old Pa Pitt is especially taken with the starburst window above the main entrance and the decorative bowling pins framing the inscription.
A small and beautiful Arts and Crafts interpretation of Gothic, with most of its original details intact, including the shingled gables, the wooden belfry, and the canopy over the tower entrance. The attached parsonage is later, but at least it nearly matches the brick.
In spite of the name, the church is on the Stowe Township side of the municipal border that runs diagonally through the neighborhood of West Park.
Old Pa Pitt knows exactly two things about the architect W. E. Laughner: first, that he had his office in the Ohio Valley Trust Building; second, that he designed this house for his own home. Both facts come from one small listing in the American Contractor for July 14, 1923: “Coraopolis, Pa.—Res. 2½ sty. & bas. Ridge av. Archt. W. E. Laughner, Ohio Valley Trust bldg. Owner W. E. Laughner, Ridge & Chestnut sts. Brk. veneer. Drawing plans.”
At any rate, this is an interesting variant on the Dutch Colonial style, with Arts-and-Crafts details that make it stand out from its neighbors. It was a good advertisement for Mr. Laughner’s architectural practice, and we suspect there are many Laughner houses lurking here and there waiting for us to discover.
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.
These pictures are very large; be careful on a metered connection.
Note how the basement garage door is carefully matched to the rest of the house.
Here is a bungalow from the book Pennsylvania Homes, published in 1925 by the Retail Lumber Dealers’ Association of Pennsylvania, which had its headquarters in the Park Building in Pittsburgh.
Some graduate student right now is probably writing a thesis on “The Idea of the Bungalow in Early-Twentieth-Century American Thought.” Certainly there is enough material for a hefty academic treatise. We could probably write a thick book just on the cultural implications of 1920s song titles: “Our Bungalow of Dreams,” “We’ll Build a Bungalow,” “A Little Bungalow,” “A Cozy Little Bungalow” (that’s a different song), “There’s a Bungalow in Dixieland,” “You’re Just the Type for a Bungalow.” And so on.
A “bungalow” in American usage was a house where the rooms were all on the ground level, though often with extra bedrooms in a finished attic. It was the predecessor of the ubiquitous ranch houses of the 1960s. It was associated with the “Craftsman” style promoted by Gustav Stickley and others. Low-pitched roofs, overhanging eaves, and simple arts-and-crafts ornament were typical of the style.
A bungalow in Beechview.The Craftsman-style roof brackets on that bungalow.
What caused American houses to go from predominantly vertical to predominantly horizontal? We will not attempt to answer that question definitively; we have to leave our hypothetical graduate student some material for a thesis. We only offer some suggestions.
First, there are practical advantages to a one-level design. Advertisements often dwell on the number of steps the bungalow saves the busy housewife, which reminds us that middle-class families were beginning to consider the possibility of getting along without servants.
Second, a small bungalow could be built very cheap. It is true that a rowhouse could be built even cheaper, but the bungalow offered the privacy of a detached house. Some of these bungalows were extraordinarily tiny: that book of Pennsylvania Homes featured a “one-room” bungalow, with a tiny kitchen, dressing room, and bathroom, and one “great room” that could become a pair of bedrooms at night by drawing a folding partition across the middle. Most were not quite so tiny: a typical bungalow had a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and one or two bedrooms on the ground floor.
Floor plan of the Vandergrift, a design for a small bungalow.Rendering of the Vandergrift.A similar bungalow in O’Hara Township.
Third, there was the suburban ideal. In the early twentieth century, Americans were persuading themselves that what they wanted was the country life, but with city conveniences—in other words, the suburb. The city did not always have room to spread out horizontally, but the suburbs were more encouraging to horizontality.
Another bungalow in O’Hara Township.
Fourth, the bungalow—as we see in all those songs—earned a place in folklore as the ideal love nest for a young couple. House builders encouraged that line of thinking with a nudge and a wink, and added the helpful incentive that a bungalow for two could be built cheaply with an unfinished attic, and then, as nature took her course, two more bedrooms could be finished upstairs.
Nevertheless, cheapness was not always the main consideration. The bungalow was a fashion, and fashionable families might build fashionable bungalows that were every bit as expensive as more traditional houses, like this generously sized cement bungalow in Beechview, built in 1911 at a cost of about $4,000, which was above the average for Beechview houses, though many cheaper (and more vertical) houses had more living space.
We hope we have given you, our hypothetical graduate student, enough inspiration to make the bungalow an attractive thesis topic. We eagerly await the results of your research.
