Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

Cedarhurst Manor, Mount Lebanon

Cedarhurst Manor is a plan where many of the houses date from the Depression era—a time, as Father Pitt has pointed out before, when there was a good bit of home construction going on, because conventional wisdom held that, if you had the money for a house, it was more economical to take advantage of low labor and materials costs and build a new one than to buy an older house. The plan is not included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District (at least not yet), but many of the houses are distinguished architecturally and well preserved.

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December 21, 2024
Baywood Street, East Liberty

Baywood Street is a typical street of upper-middle-class foursquares in East Liberty, mostly well preserved. Several have been turned into duplexes, but without much damage to the outlines of the house, as in the example below—where you should pay particular attention to the exceptionally fine round oriel on the second floor (and ignore the slightly mutilated dormer). The houses on the northeast side of the 5500 block are all the same dimensions and the same basic design, but with the fronts varied enough to make a pleasing diversity; they seem to have been built all at once at some time between 1903 and 1910, all designed with the same pencil.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

December 18, 2024
The Shingle Style in Thornburg

Thornburg is a small borough in the Chartiers valley where we can find what is probably the best group of Shingle-style houses in the Pittsburgh area. There is some good evidence that most of them were designed by Edward M. Butz, an architect whose most famous work is the Western Penitentiary. The Shingle style is rare in Pittsburgh, and though the houses are in a wide variety of forms, they share certain quirks—the second floor overhanging the first, the use of masonry for the first floor and shingles above, the exaggerated eaves—that suggest the hand of one architect in the different designs.

Sony Alpha 3000.

December 17, 2024
John Frew House, Westwood

There are very few houses from the 1700s left in the city of Pittsburgh (though there are quite a few more in the suburbs and countryside nearby), and this one just barely qualifies. Move it a hundred yards and it would be in Crafton, but it is on the Pittsburgh side of that line.

As far as anyone knows, the John Frew house is the only house from the 1700s in the city still in use as a house. The stone section on the right was built in about 1790; the bigger Greek Revival addition was built in about 1840.

Also built in 1790 was the spring house next to the house. In the 1950s, a garage was added to the spring house, and it was done with nearly perfect taste. The garage was designed on the model of the 1840 part of the house, so that the spring house and garage form a sort of reduced mirror image of the main house. Father Pitt does not know who supervised the addition, but our famous architect and preservationist Charles Stotz would have been capable of it.

Sony Alpha 3000.

December 11, 2024
A. R. D. Gillespie House, Shadyside

Some Tudor houses (or “English,” as they were usually called) stick just enough timbers in the stucco to get the message across that this is supposed to be Merrie England. This one is a bravura performance in woodwork. The 1910 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps shows it as owned by A. R. D. Gillespie, who was probably the original owner.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

December 9, 2024
Gothic Meets Modern on Acorn Hill

This stone mansion on Acorn Hill, with its eye-catching combination of Gothic and modernist details, was designed by William C. Young and built in 1937.

Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50.

“The above drawing by William C. Young, architect and builder, is of the model home being erected at the intersection of Watsonia Blvd. [now Marshall Road] and Norwood Ave., North Side, for Mr. and Mrs. John H. Phillips by the Young firm. The home is a combination of all that is modern in electrical equipment and labor saving devices with all that is charming and quaint from the old Norman English Architecture.” Old Pa Pitt thinks of “Norman” as implying the English branch of Romanesque rather than Gothic, but he will not argue about the charm.

The steps leading up to the house from Marshall Road are a masterpiece of romanticism in landscape design.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 6, 2024
Houses on Bausman Street, Knoxville

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.

Sony Alpha 3000.

December 3, 2024
North Hills Estates, Ross Township

North Hills Estates is a suburban plan in Ross Township just north of West View. It was laid out in 1929, and most of the central part was built up in the 1930s—a period when, surprisingly enough, there was quite a bit of house construction going on in the suburbs. For those who had money, it was considered more economical during the Depression to build a new house, what with the low cost of labor and materials, than to buy an existing one. Thousands of houses sat empty, repossessed by lenders, but meanwhile new suburbs like North Hills Estates filled up with beautiful homes.

This is another article for people who like to scroll through dozens of house designs and marvel at the variety of styles, and at the high quality of almost all the designs.
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November 30, 2024
Rafferty Rows, Squirrel Hill

These two long rows of houses where Beeler Street meets Wilkins Avenue make a striking impression now, but they must have been more striking when they were built in the early 1900s. For several years they sat out in the farmlands of Squirrel Hill, forming a strange urban island (along with two rows of three houses across Beeler Street) in the midst of the otherwise rural East End. We caught them on a dim and rainy evening.

1910 fire-insurance map.

Note how the rhythm of the houses is made more interestingly varied by alternating the peaked and rounded fronts but running the oriels in a series of three.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 30, 2024
Acorn Hill

Acorn Hill is a little enclave in the larger neighborhood known to residents as Observatory Hill, and on city planning maps as Perry North. It has some unusually fine houses in a wide variety of styles, built up over a period of about half a century.

Map of Acorn Hill, adapted from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database License.

In any neighborhood this one would be an extraordinary house. It would not be out of place in the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony. The porch has been glassed in and the windows in the dormers have been replaced, but the house retains most of its architectural integrity. Father Pitt does not know the architect yet, but among the local architects known to have been influenced by those German and Austrian art magazines that found their way to Pittsburgh we may mention Frederick Scheibler, Kiehnel & Elliott, and Edward Weber.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

November 29, 2024