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.

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