Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

  • A Walk on Western Avenue, Allegheny West

    Sidewalk of Western Avenue

    Some sights on one side of one block of Western Avenue, the business spine of Allegheny West. Though it has become a trendy and prosperous business district, Western Avenue still keeps its quirky combination of commercial buildings, private houses, and houses turned into commercial buildings.

    Houses on Western Avenue
    Porches
    Houses on Western Avenue
    Houses on Western Avenue
    House on Western Avenue
    House on Western Avenue

    This is a designated historic district, so that is a historic utility cable.

    House on Western Avenue
    Pair of houses
    House on Western Avenue
    House on Western Avenue
    House on Western Avenue

    This is the only house on the street that has not been expensively restored. Much original Italianate detail is left for the next ambitious owner to savor.

    Elaborate Italianate lintel
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.
    Comments

  • House with Carved Stone Trim, Allegheny West

    914 Western Avenue

    Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect of this house on Western Avenue, which looks as though it dates from somewhere around 1890. The carving in the stone trim might have been done by Achille Giammartini, who is known to have decorated many of the houses in Allegheny West.

    Stonecarving
    Gable and dormer
    Entrance
    Carved capital
    Entrance
    House and neighbors
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.
    Comments

  • Brick Houses on Wettach Street, Dutchtown

    Houses on Wettach Street
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

    These brick rowhouses—or double houses with narrow passages between—are a little more substantial than the frame houses on the other side of the street, but they fit with them in scale. The decorated cornices and dormers elevate these houses from common lower-class rowhouses to common middle-class rowhouses, and they have been attractively restored.

    Comments

  • Second Empire Row in Dutchtown

    Houses on Vinial Street
    Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.

    A long row of mansard-roofed frame houses whose various alterations have not completely diminished the impressive effect of the row.

    Comments

  • Three Houses on Howe Street, Shadyside

    Dutch Colonial house on Howe Street

    The eastern part of Howe Street grew a fine collection of upper-middle-class houses around the turn of the twentieth century. Here are three in three different styles, beginning with a fine Dutch colonial. The entrance has been altered to make the house an apartment building, but otherwise the details are in good shape.

    Queen Anne house

    Here is a sturdy foursquare house with Queen Anne details.

    Tudor house
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    Finally, a Tudor with an imaginative randomness made even more random by later alterations and additions.

    Comments

  • A Tall House on the South Side

    House in the back streets of the South Side
    Ansco Memar with AristaEDU ISO 100 film.

    Originally a store with upstairs living quarters. The corner location made a side entrance for the living quarters possible.

    Comments

  • E. M. Butz House, Manchester

    E. M. Butz house, Manchester

    Edward M. Butz was a prominent and successful architect of the late 1800s whose reach extended far beyond Pittsburgh. (One notable still-standing public building designed by Butz is the Wicomico County Courthouse in Salisbury, Maryland.) Many years later, in 1936, Maurice Trimble remembered that “Mr. Butz was a veritable human dynamo; he designed among other buildings, the Western Penitentiary, the Uniontown Court House and Jail and many of those snappy Victorian Gothic houses, some of which were cleverly done.”

    One of those snappy Victorian houses was this one. Mr. Butz designed it and lived in it with his family in the late 1870s. The house had an unfortunate renovation in the middle 1900s, with small horizontal windows installed on the second floor in place of the original tall windows; but the current owners have used paint to mask the mismatched brickwork and integrate the original features of the house as much as possible.

    Dormer
    Lintel with incised decoration
    Windows

    Today the ground floor is home to a fancy cocktail bar called “The Lion.”

    Butz house
    Butz house
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
    Comments

  • Some Houses on Cedar Avenue, Dutchtown

    908 Cedar Avenue

    Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.

    Lintel with incised decoration
    Incised decoration
    Roof brackets
    Front door
    906 and 904 Cedar Avenue
    906 and 904
    904
    Balcony and round window
    900

    For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.

    900
    1006 and 1004
    916
    916
    916
    916
    Face on a keystone, 906 Cedar Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    Comments

  • Clara Morris House, Point Breeze

    House on Lexington Avenue

    S. A. Barr was the architect of this house, built in 1894 for Mrs. Clara Morris.1 A woman’s home is her castle, and this one looks as though it might be a very effective defense against Mrs. Morris’ neighbors the Fricks.

    House on Lexington Avenue
    House on Lexington Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    1. The Engineering Record, May 12, 1894: “Lexington av and Tuscarora st. 2-story br and stone dwell; cost, $12,000; o, C M Morris; a, S & A [sic] Barr; b, S J Crooks.” Tuscarora Street was planned to cross Lexington here. Also, Record & Guide, February 14, 1894, p. 75. “Architect S. A. Barr, 42½ Sixth Street, has made plans for a handsome stone and buff brick dwelling, to be erected on Lexington Avenue, for Mrs. Clara Morris.” ↩︎
    Comments

  • A Hillside House in California-Kirkbride

    1102 Sunday Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    This splendidly restored house is in a kind of variant of the Second Empire style that must have seemed very modern when the architect drew it. It has the exuberantly eclectic boundary-crossing details that made Victorian architecture an adventure. Unlike the strict revivalists, Victorian architects like the unknown who designed this house did not consider themselves bound to a pedantically correct interpretation of one period. Unlike the modernists who came after the strict revivalists, the Victorians felt free to pillage their ideas from every historical period. The result could be an atrocity if the pillaging was done without taste, but with taste it could create complex compositions that were like nothing that had been seen before, but were nevertheless in internal harmony.