Seminole Terrace is not included yet in the Mount Lebanon Historic Discrict, but the older part of the plan is a museum of good domestic architecture from the 1920s and 1930s—a time when the Colonial Revival, the Fairy-Tale Style, and various other fantasies of an elegant past could coexist comfortably in a newly laid-out automobile suburb. Here are some of the houses we saw on a walk along Navahoe Drive. We’ve seen some of these houses before, but we can always see them again.
Linden Avenue in Point Breeze filled up fairly slowly from the 1880s on, and it has always been a desirable neighborhood, so it is a museum of good domestic architecture from many different eras. The wide variety of houses makes it a very pleasant street for an afternoon stroll. We have already seen the Frank Alden house and the Joseph Langfitt mansion; here are some more Linden Avenue houses from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Ingham & Boyd were the architects of this very respectable French cottage overlooking Wilkins Avenue from a little service road.1 It was built for W. A. Steinmeyer, vice-president of the Allemannia Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh. The placement of the entrance at the left instead of in the center is uncharacteristic of the architects, and we can only assume that some desirable interior arrangement made it worth departing from their usual rule of exact symmetry.
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.
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.
More houses from Seminole Hills, for which no excuse is needed, since the variety of styles and the imaginative designs speak for themselves.
One of the most remarkable things about the houses in the Mount Lebanon Historic District is how little they change. Many of them are preserved almost exactly as they were built—like this one, built in 1934 from a design by Hannah & Sterling. Hannah is Thomas Hannah, an architect at the end of a long and prosperous career when this house was built; Sterling was the younger P. Howard Sterling, who would continue designing houses in Mount Lebanon after his older partner died. The picture above shows the house as it appears today, and the fuzzy microfilm picture (it’s the lower of these two pictures) from the Pittsburgh Press right after the house was built matches it almost exactly.
As we mentioned before, we are attempting to photograph every house in the residential part of Schenley Farms. Here is a big album of houses on Bigelow Boulevard, which becomes a residential street as it winds through the neighborhood. Above, Ledge House, the strikingly different home of A. A. Hamerschlag, the first director of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was designed by Henry Hornbostel, who designed the Carnegie Tech campus and taught at Carnegie Tech. It has recently been cleaned of a century’s worth of industrial soot and restored to its original appearance.
Above and below, the D. Herbert Hostetter, Jr., house, architects Janssen and Abbott. Benno Janssen and his partner abstracted the salient details of the Tudor or “English half-timber” style and reduced it to the essentials, creating a richly Tudory design with no wasted lines.
Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.
(more…)
On city planning maps, this house is in Chateau, but socially it was at the end of the Lincoln Avenue row of rich people’s houses in Allegheny West. Today it sits surrounded by robotics works and fast-food joints, but it is kept in beautifully original condition by its owners. The architects were Longfellow, Alden & Harlow (or some subset of those three), at the very beginning of their practice—just about the time they designed Sunnyledge, which is something like a stretched version of this house. Enlarge the picture and note the patterns in the brickwork.
