“God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, and the details that would have refined the style of this double house have been lost: windows have been replaced, a hipped roof (invisible from this angle) replaced the original flat roof about six years ago, and we suspect that the porch railings and aluminum canopies are not original. Even so, we can see enough to see that this was an interestingly modern construction when it went up, probably in the late 1930s or the 1940s. The corner windows were a badge of modernity.
C. D. Cooley, an architect who was associated with the Bartberger brothers for a while in the firm of Bartberger, Cooley & Bartberger, built this home for himself in the newly accessible suburb of Brookline, which had suddenly become an easy commute from downtown Pittsburgh when the Transit Tunnel opened. It is a beautiful house even now, little altered from Mr. Cooley’s vision, and it stands out from its more pedestrian neighbors as a work of unusual taste.
But tragedy struck the Cooley family. In 1915, Mrs. Cooley died. She was only thirty years old.1 About half a year later, Mr. Cooley put the house up for sale.
Pittsburg Press, March 23, 1916.
“Built by Pittsburg architect for home at cost of $9,000, but, owing to death in family will sacrifice to quick buyer.”
We might add that the building cost of $9,000 might have been twice the cost of neighboring houses in Brookline. The house was not huge, but by Brookline standards it was luxurious, with expensive materials—stone instead of brick, and oak where neighboring houses would have had cheap yellow pine.
Father Pitt loves chimney pots, and these simple rectangular ones are perfectly matched to the style of the house.
This striking design was by Janssen & Abbott, and it shows Benno Janssen developing that economy of line old Pa Pitt associates with his best work, in which there are exactly the right number of details to create the effect he wants and no more. The row was built in about 1913.1 The resemblance to another row on King Avenue in Highland Park is so strong that old Pa Pitt attributes that row to Janssen & Abbott as well.
The terrace on King Avenue, Highland Park. In some secondary sources, this one is misattributed to Frederick Scheibler, but Scheibler’s biographer Martin Aurand found no evidence linking him to this terrace.
These houses are not quite as well kept as the ones in Highland Park. They have been turned into duplexes and seem to have fallen under separate ownership, resulting in—among other alterations—the tiniest aluminum awnings old Pa Pitt has ever seen up there on the attic dormers of two of the houses.
Nevertheless, the design still overwhelms the miscellaneous alterations and makes this one of the most interesting terraces in Oakland.
The houses in this row at the upper end of 46th Street were all built on the same plan. They were put up in two stages around the turn of the twentieth century, though they are not much different from Pittsburgh rowhouses of a hundred years earlier. The rising value of Lawrenceville real estate has caused an epidemic of third-floor expansions recently; Father Pitt will admit to thinking they are ugly, but by matching the square footage to the value of the location they keep the main structure of the house in good shape. Below we see one house with its original dormer (and classic aluminum awning) and one house with a new third floor (and apologetic little contemporary awningette).
Sitting at the eastern end of the Great Soho Curve, these houses face eastward, so that they are right in front of you as you travel west on Fifth Avenue. Father Pitt was very sad some years ago when one of the row burned, leaving an irreparable gap; but the rest of the houses, after some years of neglect, are in good shape.
The houses have breezeways between them, which we could not leave undocumented.
Within their low-budget limits, these little houses are of an attractive design, and they are very well kept up. The odd-shaped lot also means that they are staggered in a visually interesting way. But, still, they would be just seven among thousands of Pittsburgh rowhouses if they had not been painted in this striking way that lights up the whole block.
Some day these houses will disappear. They are typical of middle-class houses that sprouted on the Hill in the 1890s, making use of the Second Empire mansard roof to give these narrow houses two more bedrooms on the third floors. Generations of condemnation notices have been pasted on them. They would be worth restoring if they were moved to another neighborhood, and perhaps they have some hope here, now that the Hill is growing new construction and looking more hopeful. But it isn’t likely that they’ll win their race with the wrecking ball.
Four houses on Stanton Avenue, which is the line that separates Highland Park from East Liberty. First, two that obviously go together, though they differ in a few details.
Here is a house we might describe as center-hall-Colonial-Baroque.
The Baroque details of the central dormer need a bit of restoration. We hope they can be repaired rather than simply replaced with simpler wood (or aluminum or vinyl).
Finally, a house that is more than twenty years younger than its neighbors; the lot was still vacant in 1923, according to plat maps.
Paul Irwin designed this house for R. P. McAllister; it was built in about 1920. (Father Pitt knows this information because the owners of the house helpfully inscribed it on a bronze plaque around the corner at the delivery entrance.) Though it is eclectic in its influences, everything works in harmony, from the Georgian front door to the Japanese eyebrow in the roofline to the surprising outbreaks of half-timbering in the rear.
The late Franklin Toker believed that these houses were probably designed by Frederick Scheibler. He was following the original scholars of Frederick Scheibler, Shear and Schmertz, who brought poor old Scheibler out of obscurity in his old age in time to see himself hailed as a prophet of modern architecture.
Father Pitt hates to contradict Dr. Toker, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Pittsburgh architecture was probably unmatched; but Toker has been wrong before. Martin Aurand, whose biography of Scheibler will probably remain the definitive one for generations to come, lists these houses under the “misattributions.”
Old Pa Pitt himself is of the Aurand opinion, and in fact Father Pitt has probable grounds for attributing these houses—without, however, claiming complete certainty—to Benno Janssen. His reason is that there is a very similar terrace in Oakland (368–376 McKee Place) that is almost certainly by Janssen & Abbott. Father Pitt hopes to have pictures of those houses soon; meanwhile, you can take his word for it—or look them up on Google Street View—that it would be odd if one of these terraces were by Janssen & Abbott and the other by Scheibler.
These houses are yet another clever answer to the question of how to design a terrace of relatively inexpensive houses so that they are architecturally attractive and distinctive—so that, in other words, they make potential tenants think they’re getting something special. Compare them, for example, to the row just next door to the left, which was built on a lower budget to a much more ordinary design.
