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.
Earlier known as the Deniston School, and now known as the Swissvale Schoolhouse Condominiums. Rieger & Currier (whose name is misspelled Courrier, Carrier, and any number of other ways in construction listings, but Currier is the spelling he used in his own signature) were the architects of this square Georgian school, built in 1902.
The best old Pa Pitt can say about those outsized dormers that sprouted on the front recently is that they could be worse, and they could be scraped off in a future restoration with minimal damage to the appearance of the building.
The cornerstone of this church was laid in 1959, which for the moment is all old Pa Pitt knows about it. The style is the New England Colonial that became popular to the point of mania among suburban congregations with conservative tastes after the Second World War, and this is a tasteful and attractive example of it.
Thomas Benner Garman, one of the leading architects of Mount Lebanon, designed this as a builder’s “Triple-Insulated” model house. It was promoted by the Sun-Telegraph as it was going up in 1937. “Triple-insulation, the builder explains, means the use of materials to armor the house against fire, water and weather.”1
Given a corner lot, Garman responded by giving the house two fronts. The front door is on a typical Colonial Revival façade of the sort that we see hundreds of in Mount Lebanon—many of them designed by Garman.
But around the corner is a porch with two-storey columns, giving the house a secondary plantation-style front.
Perhaps it is stretching a point to call this first one a mansion, but it is a big house built with the best materials.
A Georgian mansion that would look at home in Annapolis or Williamsburg.
A different and less pedantically correct take on Colonial Revival. Note the shutters that actually shut.
The garage has a comfortable apartment for your chauffeur.
The Smith mansion is built of very dark brick in a subdued Flemish Renaissance style. Appropriately, the bricks are laid in Flemish bond.
By the time these houses were being put up, probably in the late 1930s or early 1940s, the “Colonial” style had grown almost to a mania. It would take over the housing market in the second half of the twentieth century to such an extent that nine out of ten houses in real-estate listings of the 1990s were described as “colonial,” though most of them bore little resemblance to any architecture known from before the American Revolution.
These three houses are all built on the same basic plan: the rooms arranged around a small center hall with stairway. The house above proclaims its Colonial ambitions with a front door surrounded by a simple and attractive classical frame.
The main house is on the same plan as the previous house, but here a front porch is added, and a charming garage with miniature cupola plays up the Colonial theme.
Once again the same basic layout, but here the second floor is done in siding (wood originally) instead of brick, and a small vestibule is added at the front entrance.
More Schenley Farms houses in the snow (many with bonus icicles), beginning with this 1909 house, designed by Vrydaugh & Wolfe.
We have not yet found an architect for this lavish Tudor house, built in 1906.
Another one whose architect we don’t know yet, also built in 1906.
A free interpretation of Colonial by Alden & Harlow, built in 1921.
Designed by Louis Stevens and built in 1911.
Designed by Benno Janssen and built in 1912.
Designed by Simpson & Schmeltz and built in 1909.
Designed by Rutan & Russell and built in 1909.
Designed by C. E. Mueller and built in 1908.
Designed by Simpson & Isles and built in 1914.
This side of Roycroft Avenue—which was the sunny side yesterday afternoon—is in the St. Clair Terrace plan (the other side is part of a different plan). As with many of the plans in the Mt. Lebanon Historic District, the lots were sold off to buyers who would hire their own architects to design their dream houses. The result is a pleasingly eclectic collection of houses whose designs are all of high quality. We’ve seen some of these houses before, but the deep snow added an irresistible picturesqueness.
Craftsman meets Colonial in an attractive double duplex whose details are exceptionally well preserved—notably the showy carved brackets and the windows.
The Wilkinsburg borough building, which also houses the library, was designed by Theodore Eichholz in 1938, at the height of the mania for Colonial American architecture spurred by the restoration of Williamsburg. It opened on the first day of 1940.1 In these past two years it has been getting some restoration, including replacement of those tall columns, which are made of wood. The old ones had rotted; these new ones, carefully duplicating the originals, are supposedly treated to prevent rot—although if you only have to replace your wooden columns once every eighty-five years, you’re not doing too badly.
