Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

A Bunch of Houses on Thomas Boulevard, North Point Breeze

A while ago, Father Pitt took a walk on Thomas Boulevard in the light rain, so don’t be surprised to see raindrops in some of these pictures. Thomas Boulevard, like McPherson Boulevard, has an eclectic mixture of housing from duplexes through Shingle-style mansions to medium-sized apartment buildings. Today we’re concentrating on the houses, some of which are magnificent. Above, a Shingle-style house with all its shingles in place.

If you ever asked yourself how much difference materials really make in the appearance of a house, compare this Shingle-style house, where the shingles have been replaced with fake siding and paste-on shutters, to the one above.

A typical Pittsburgh Renaissance palace that has turned into an apartment building.

A house with Queen Anne outlines that has been modernized with reasonably good taste.

This frame house was in deplorable condition before it was updated and made to look like a product of the twenty-first century. You can look on Google Street View to see the specific meaning old Pa Pitt assigns to “deplorable.” With an unlimited budget, Father Pitt would prefer to restore a house like this to its original design. With a limited budget, this was a good result.

This turret with house attached needs some rescuing. It has what the real-estate people call good bones, and that turret ought to be attractive to a well-off eccentric now that the neighborhood is on the upswing.

A big center-hall house that is now solar-powered.

A stony foursquare with Queen Anne details. It has lost its porch, but the third floor retains fine original woodwork and windows.

A center-hall colonial from early in the Colonial Revival, when Georgian was filtered through a late-Victorian lens.

This is a variation on the same plan as the previous house, which is right next to it; they were probably built at the same time and designed by the same hand. The porch has been replaced with a modern construction that does not quite fit, but the house looks much better with this porch than it would look with no porch at all.

This towering center-hall manse makes spectacular use of Kittanning brick in Frederick Sauer’s favorite color. The beefiness of it, along with the well-balanced selection of picturesque details, makes us think that Sauer is a good suspect for the architect.

This house grew a large balcony when it was turned into a duplex.

A big square house with typical Queen Anne details, especially the little balcony and the curved surfaces covered with shingles.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

This is a typical Pittsburgh Foursquare, but with an oversized dormer that gives it a good bit of extra space on the third floor.

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April 12, 2025
The Thomas Row, South Side

It is a little hard to date these houses on South 10th Street from old plat maps, and any South Side historians who have good information are earnestly invited to enlighten us. The two on the right end are separate from the rest and slightly larger. A row of houses appears on this land in 1872, belonging to someone named Thomas. In 1882, however, all but the two houses on the right are gone; the rest of the land is vacant. By 1890 the row is full again, still belonging to the Thomas family, except for the last house on the left, which belongs to someone named Todt.

Father Pitt’s best guess, then, is that the two houses on the right date from the Civil War era. The rest of the houses might have burned in about 1880, and were rebuilt in what was still the usual vernacular style for small rowhouses. But this is only a wild guess, and more information would be welcome. It is, after all, possible that the 1882 map was wrong, and the houses never went away.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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April 11, 2025
Snively House, North Point Breeze

This fashionably Romanesque house was probably built in the 1890s for a W. Snively. It has been converted to apartments, but the original outlines of the house are still evident. If, by the way, you are embarrassed by the soot stains on the stone of your house, old Pa Pitt suggests overcoming your embarrassment and embracing the history that soot represents. The alternative of painting your stone grey is not a success.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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April 10, 2025
A Few Houses on Perrysville Avenue, Perry Hilltop

Perrysville Avenue started as a plank road, with tollgates, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it began to fill up as the spine of a pleasant suburban neighborhood of Allegheny. Today Perry Hilltop is a strange mixture of appalling decay and beautiful restoration: it has never quite got off the ground as a trendy neighborhood, but some of the houses have been beautifully preserved. The splendid Dutch Colonial mansion above, for example, is in very good shape. Note the original windows. It was probably built around the turn of the twentieth century.

A Victorian frame house that preserves some of its original details, including the trim around the windows. It appears on an 1882 plat map, so it probably dates from the 1870s.

This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.

This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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April 9, 2025
Brightridge Street Rows, Perry South

This short block in the North Charles Street Valley has suffered some attrition of houses, but the remaining houses have been restored beautifully and give us a good idea of how the street looked. They were built in about 1887. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation attributes the design to William A. Stone, who would be governor of Pennsylvania ten years later; but Father Pitt suspects Stone may have been the developer rather than the architect.

The houses on the northwest side of the street are tiny but create an impression of prosperity.

The houses on the southeast side of the street are slightly less tiny; they are a little wider, and their mansard roofs give them a full third floor.

April 8, 2025
Residence of W. L. Phillips, Architect, North Point Breeze

This photograph appeared in the fifth exhibition of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club in 1910 (and was reproduced in the catalogue). The house must have seemed quite modern and up to date; it would not have seemed old-fashioned thirty years later. Old Pa Pitt has not studied Mr. Phillips’ career yet, but he was obviously successful enough to build a fine house for himself in a fashionable part of town.

It is cheering to report that the house is still in excellent condition today. A front porch has been added, but with good taste, so that we would hardly guess it had not been part of the original composition.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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April 8, 2025
A Stroll on McPherson Boulevard, North Point Breeze

North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.

We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.

A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.

A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.

Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.

An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.

A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.

A small apartment building.

A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.

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April 2, 2025
Row of Houses on Charles Street, Knoxville

This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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March 27, 2025
Folk Art in a Gable in Beltzhoover

Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.¹ The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.

Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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March 25, 2025
House by Louis Bellinger in Beltzhoover
For his entire career, Louis A. S. Bellinger was the only Black registered architect in western Pennsylvania. His most famous work today is the Pythian Temple, later the New Granada Theater, on the Hill. This is a much smaller project—a six-room house built in 1929 for a middle-class client.¹ But the client got his money’s worth. It’s not a work of towering genius: it’s just the best house you could get for the money, designed by a man who knew how to take the ordinary Pittsburgh house and make it a little bit special.

The house is abandoned and overgrown, and it will probably not last much longer. It would take a miracle to save it—a miracle that made the location suddenly valuable, since it will require a nearly complete gutting to put the house back in livable shape. All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists now, so that future historians will know that Louis Bellinger made it.

It appears that the house originally had an open porch with an arched entrance; later most of the porch was closed in to make another room. The large window opening in front was a good bit larger when it was an open porch, as we can tell by the slight difference in mortar in the bricks to either side of the window.

Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
1. Source: The Charette, January, 1929, p. 12. “602. Architect: Louis A. S. Bellinger, 525 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: Robert T. Smith. Title: One family dwelling, six rooms and bath. Location: 85 Sylvania Ave. Contract awarded to Vincent Mingers. Contract price: $8700.00.” ↩︎
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March 20, 2025