Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

A Few Houses on Fordham Avenue, Brookline

Fordham Avenue in Brookline includes some unusually expensive houses for the neighborhood. The one above has had some updates, but the outlines are still handsome.

The picture above is included especially for connoisseurs of aluminum awnings.

A well-preserved foursquare of a very high grade—stone on the ground floor, shingle above. It is unusual to find houses like this where the shingles have not been replaced by aluminum or vinyl siding.

This one has had its side windows blocked in by some heliophobe long past, but is otherwise in fine shape.

This house has changed very little since it was built. It was offered for sale for $6,900 in 1913, and a photograph in the advertisement shows the house looking pretty much the way it looks now, including the original windows.

Pittsburgh Gazette Times, May 18, 1913.

Note the seller: Walter R. Fleming. If you had bought this house, Mr. Fleming would have been your next-door neighbor. He had just finished his own house, which was pictured a few weeks earlier in the same paper.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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February 20, 2026
Four Mansions on Wilkins Avenue, Squirrel Hill

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.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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February 19, 2026
A Few Houses on Parkman Avenue, Schenley Farms

Five houses on Parkman Avenue, and once again we take our attributions with gratitude from the anonymous Google Maps user who built a map of Architects of Schenley Farms Residences. The one above was designed by Louis Stevens and built in 1910.

Designed by D. Simpson & Co. and built in 1915.

Designed by Louis Stevens and built in 1915.

Designed by Maximilian Nirdlinger and built in 1911.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

Designed by Maximilian Nirdlinger and built in 1911.

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February 17, 2026
Row of Houses on Dithridge Street, Oakland

This row of seven houses presents a pleasingly varied streetscape, but the houses were clearly all part of the same development. Old Pa Pitt is fairly sure the architects were Rieger & Currier, and for the obsessive historians in the readership, here is his evidence. In the Philadelphia Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide for February 27, 1901, p. 136, we find this item:

Rieger & Currier, Smith Building, have prepared plans for four brick dwellings to be erected on Ditheridge [sic] street for Mr. J. Friday.

A plat map from about 1903 shows that J. Friday owned land along Dithridge Street on which at least eleven houses, some possibly doubles, were built. Three were on the east side of the street where the Latter Day Saints church is now. The others were on the west side and still stand. Numbers 229–253, part of the Friday property, clearly form a group, and probably the only group in which four houses could have been built together at one time. If we assume that they were built in one group of three and one group of four, these are all Rieger & Currier houses.

The houses have been divided into apartments, and a couple of them have had porch amputations or reductions, but on the whole the look of the row is well preserved.

And now a bonus house, just past the Friday row, a fine center-hall house in the free turn-of-the-twentieth-century version of Georgian.

Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

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February 16, 2026
Fairy-Tale Cottage in Virginia Manor, Mount Lebanon

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

One of those visions of a fantasy past that resemble storybook illustrations more than they do any real historical architecture. This one is exceptionally fine, the fantastical elements carried out with good taste, and of course the snow added to the fairy-tale effect.

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February 12, 2026
Ledge House, Schenley Farms

Henry Hornbostel had designed the campus of Carnegie Tech, and he taught architecture there, so he was the natural choice when the institution’s first president, Arthur A. Hamerschlag, decided to build a house nearby in Schenley Farms. The result, as you might expect from Hornbostel, was something unique—modern but not modernistic, picturesque but not gaudy, eclectic but harmonious. It sits on a ledge, following the terrain with its unusual obtuse angle, and therefore was known as Ledge House.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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February 11, 2026
Godfrey Stengel House, Schenley Farms

Built in 1913, this house is a minor landmark of early modernism in Pittsburgh. Kiehnel & Elliott were the architects, and Richard Kiehnel had a thoroughly German architectural education. He applied the latest Jugendstil ideas of decoration, with a little Prairie Style thrown in, to the forms that were popular in Pittsburgh—like the standard three-storey Renaissance palace that is the basis of this house. The combination was a winner: clients got something that looked bracingly up to date, but didn’t make their neighbors hate them.

Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

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February 9, 2026
Three Houses in Beechview, 1916 and Today

The image above comes to us courtesy of the amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site. It shows Princess Avenue in Beechview at the intersection with Westfield Street, and the houses in the picture all still stand today. We’ll look at three of them (we’ve already seen the duplex at far right), beginning with the biggest and most elaborate.

Here is a center-hall house that must have been well above the usual budget for Beechview houses. We notice the diamond panes in the upper sashes of the upstairs windows—a style we noticed elsewhere in Beechview and had reason to think might be associated with the architect W. Ward Williams. The house is now divided into apartments, but retains many of its characteristic details.

This gambrel-roofed cottage has had its porch filled in to make a sunroom, which the photograph shows us had already happened by 1916. A photo of the house still under construction represented Beechwood, the original name of Beechview, in an ad for the plan in the Gazette for May 7, 1905.

By the way, do you notice how the advertisement dwells on the paved streets? Take a look at the 1916 photograph again.

The Brookline Connection site once again comes through with a better version of the same picture:

Street names in Beechview have changed, in many cases more than once: Grove Street was the original name of this part of Princess Avenue.

A gable-fronted foursquare house. Except for the replacement of its original porch rail with a more durable brick one, it has hardly changed at all.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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February 9, 2026
Some Houses on Tennyson Avenue, Schenley Farms

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.

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Designed by Simpson & Isles and built in 1914.

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February 6, 2026
G. P. Rhodes House, Squirrel Hill

G. P. Rhodes, who appears to have been a banker from the references we find to him in old newspapers, was the owner of this Tudor mansion on Wilkins Avenue. The roof has been replaced with asphalt shingles meant to look like tiles, but otherwise the details are very well preserved.

This garage was probably built as a stable, where Mr. Rhodes’ horses lived better than may of their human neighbors.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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February 5, 2026