Father Pitt

Tag: Colonial Revival

Shadycrest Village, Beechview

Shadycrest Village was just beginning construction when it opened for inspection on Valentine’s Day of 1943. The first stage of the development included modest six-room houses like these, done in the cheap and simple 1940s interpretation of the “Colonial” style.

Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, March 28, 1943, p. 43.

Economical though they were, the houses were up to date, according to the puffery the developers distributed to the papers.

Noteworthy features being built in Shadycrest homes include colonial balustrade stairways, which are wide and easy to climb; improved bathroom fixtures; medicine cabinets, linoleum kitchen and bathroom floors; improved steel casement windows, easy to clean from inside the house, insulted ceilings, Kastone laundry trays, tilt-up garage doors, cabinet sink sets, wallcases edged with non-corrosive metal, and electric ventilating fans.

They also had generous lots to stand on, and—since we were in the middle of the Second World War—the publicity pointed out how much space you would have for a victory garden.

Lots in this development will all be good-sized, ranging from 100 to 200 feet deep. This means that owners will have enough ground for their own victory gardens and can raise their own vegetables.

“Way to New Housing,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, February 14, 1943, p. 18.

The location was a big attraction—“so near the downtown district, and above the smog level”—although “6 minutes to downtown” assumes no pauses in driving through the Tubes, which was no more likely in 1943 than it is now.

The development continued to grow, and the larger part of it was made up of five-room double houses in the same simplified Colonial style. These sold rapidly at the end of the war, as returning soldiers looked for places to settle down and raise families.

Cheap though they were, these little houses have aged well. The neighborhood is still very pleasant today, and we notice that many residents still take advantage of the generous lots that come even with the doubles to plant cheerful gardens.

If you visit a friend in Shadycrest, you may need to be very careful about your navigation. The development began on established streets like Tropical Avenue, but as it grew the developers added new winding dead-end streets, and they had to come up with names for them. So…

Shadycrest Drive
Shadycrest Road
Shadycrest Court
Shadycrest Place
Shadygrove Avenue
Shadyview Place

Finding a house in Shadycrest requires an instinct for pedantic specificity.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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September 2, 2025
Rennerdale First United Presbyterian Church

The little village of Rennerdale sits halfway between Carnegie and Oakdale on the Noblestown Road. This corner-tower frame church, with its Colonial-style details, reminds us of the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church designed by James Allison; and since we know that Allison designed other buildings in the area, it would not surprise us to find that he was responsible for this one. It has been swathed in artificial siding, as our few surviving frame churches usually are; but the siding men did an unusually good job of making sure that the windows and doors were properly framed. The church still belongs to its original congregation.

There’s still a bell in that belfry.

Olympus E-20N.

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August 26, 2025
Three Houses on Aiken Avenue, Shadyside

Parking garages sometimes give us good views of the surrounding buildings, and no one questions your right to be there as long as you look respectable enough. (The powdered wig helps.) Here are three interesting houses on Aiken Avenue seen from the Shadyside Hospital garage. First, an unusually well-preserved Shingle-style house with a lush crop of shingles.

This Queen Anne house has been turned into seven apartments, to judge by counting mailboxes and doorbells.

Finally, this mansion in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Colonial style has grown an apartment building in its back yard, a disease to which some old houses are subject in urban neighborhoods. It appears on Google Maps as a “community correction center,” so if you make a mistake in typing you can probably come here to have it corrected professionally. Old Pa Pitt prefers to make his own corrections, but he is glad there is a service for people who need it.

Canon PowerShot A540.

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July 26, 2025
Georgian Mansion in Ingram

An exceptionally splendid instance of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Georgian architecture from the days when the Colonial Revival was beginning to gather steam.

Olympus E-20N; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

July 7, 2025
Overbrook Municipal Building

Overbrook was one of the last boroughs to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh. In 1929, when it was still independent, it built this fine all-in-one municipal building from a design by architect Louis Stevens, who is best remembered for houses for the rich and the upper middle class but also designed most of the public buildings for the borough of Overbrook. As far as old Pa Pitt knows, the building still belongs to the city of Pittsburgh, which has used it for various purposes over the years. It has been sensitively renovated and seems to have a secure future.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

In seventeen and a half years of articles, this is the first time old Pa Pitt has published one about Overbrook. It just goes to show how much more there is to do. Even another seventeen and a half years will not come near to finishing the job, so Father Pitt will just have to keep working.

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March 27, 2025
Old Post Office, Coraopolis

Colonial revival had passed from a fashion to a mania by the 1930s, with the restoration of Williamsburg capturing the American imagination with visions of an elegant Georgian past. Small federal buildings, especially post offices, almost always adopted the Georgian style—as we see in this modest post office with its neat Georgian entrance, complete with fanlight. The post office has moved to larger quarters, but the building is kept in original shape by its current occupants.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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January 10, 2025
The Back Streets of Coraopolis

Coraopolis is notable for the variety of styles in its houses. Many have been altered over the years, but the back streets are still very pleasant. A few weeks ago, old Pa Pitt took a long walk through Coraopolis on a slightly drizzly day.

This seems to be the parsonage for the Methodist church next door.

The siding has swallowed the original details in this house, but it is neatly kept, and the Georgian form of it still carries a load of dignity.

This is a sad thing to happen to any house, especially a fine Dutch colonial on a pleasant street like this. We hope insurance will cover putting the house back together; we place it here in the middle of the album so that it will be documented if it has to be demolished, but there are still plenty of cheerful pictures to follow.

A pair of brick-and-stucco houses that stand out for their unusual choice of material by Coraopolis standards.

The Colonial Revival comes to Coraopolis in an exceptionally tasteful small house.

This center-hall house is remarkable, but not more remarkable than the trees in the front yard.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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January 2, 2025
Unity Presbyterian Church, Green Tree

Originally the Wallace Memorial Presbyterian Church. In 2013, Dormont Presbyterian Church closed, and its congregation merged with this one; the two congregations together took the appropriate name Unity.

The current church building was put up in 1952 in the fashionable New England Colonial style; it’s a good example of that type.

The smaller Gothic church replaced by the 1952 church is still standing next to it, now in use as a music school.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

November 17, 2024
Altholl, Highland Park

“Altholl” was built on Stanton Avenue for U. S. Steel executive James Scott in 1900. Stanton Avenue, which today is marked as the border between Highland Park and East Liberty on city planning maps, was already lined with grand Queen Anne mansions; but the Colonial Revival was coming into fashion, and Scott’s house must have looked bracingly modern. It has the adaptable form of the typical large Pittsburgh center-hall house of the turn of the twentieth century, which can swing from Georgian to Renaissance to Prairie Style depending on the details. We’ll call this one “eclectic Georgian.” The house is listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 12, 2024
Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

This is an old congregation, founded in 1837, and its adjoining cemetery has some stones dating from shortly after that. It has grown continuously; the building you see here was designed by Chauncey W. Hodgdon and built in 1915, and encrusted with additions fore and aft in later years. But the congregation (still Methodist, but advertising itself these days just as “Ingomar Church”) outgrew this church and built a much bigger one across the street; this is now the Ingomar Church Community Life Center.

The 1915 church was originally built very cheaply; its final cost of about $9,000 was roughly equivalent to the price of two middle-class houses at the time. A good history of the church was written in 1962 by Margaret L. Sweeney, and we take our information from that booklet (but we have corrected the spelling of the architect’s name).

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The new building across the street is in a grandiose New Classical style that recalls colonial New England churches and refracts them through a Postmodernist lens.

Ingomar is an unincorporated community that straddles two municipalities. Most of the church grounds and the cemetery are in the borough of Franklin Park, but the border with McCandless Township runs diagonally through this building.

October 27, 2024