Tag: Carriage Houses

  • Willock House, Allegheny West

    Willock house

    We’ve seen this house before, and all old Pa Pitt can say is here it is again, in more detail. Steel baron B. F. Jones, who had a big house next door, hired architect W. Ross Proctor to design this narrow chateau for his daughter and her husband (the house belonged to the daughter, according to plat maps). A few years later, B. F. replaced his big house with an immense mansion that dwarfed his daughter’s house.

    Porch and entrance
    Willock house
    Willock house

    In the rear you can see a carriage house, built a little later than the main house. The carriage house alone is bigger than most people’s houses, and it had ample living quarters for the coachman upstairs.

    Carriage house
    Alley side of the carriage house
    Carriage house
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak EasyShare Z981.

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  • Carriage House in Elliott

    Carriage house

    Old Pa Pitt is delighted to report that, since this picture was taken in the summer of 2000, this almost perfectly preserved carriage house has been restored and refurbished into a habitable building, with glass in the upper windows and other such modern conveniences (see the pictures below). Nevertheless, he reports it with a tiny bit of regret. There’s a fascination frantic in a ruin that’s romantic, and restoring the building inevitably takes it one more step away from its origin. Certainly it was good to restore it; the only alternative would have been to let it continue to decay and eventually vanish. But Father Pitt is happy that he was able to preserve this picture from the time when it had never been anything other than a carriage house.

    An update: According to old maps, this seems to have been built in the 1880s; it appears in 1890 but not in 1882.

    Carriage house
    Carriage house

    Note the perfect little I-house to the left of the carriage house.