Pembroke Place is a street of unusually fine houses in the very rich part of Shadyside. We have already seen the Acheson House; here is a generous album of other houses on the street.
In 1913, George Best decided to develop a little square of land in Oakmont by subdividing it into tiny lots and putting up modest but attractive houses. To manage the modest-but-attractive part of the scheme, he hired architect George Schwan. In American architectural history he is perhaps most famous as the architect of most of the buildings in the original section of the Goodyear Heights neighborhood of Akron, beginning in 1917. This earlier development is on a more modest scale, but it also involved putting up a bunch of houses at once with enough variation to make the neighborhood attractive.
The plan had twenty-eight of these houses in four rows of seven. This Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1921 shows the layout:
Seven houses on one side of Second street, seven on one side of Third, and fourteen somewhat smaller houses on both sides of the narrow alley Beech Street.
Originally the houses were brick on the first floors and shingle above, and they would have been charming in their modest way. Over the years the shingles have been replaced with aluminum and vinyl siding, but enough of the original character remains to show what Schwan had in mind.
These are not great works of the imagination. They are, however, a good solution to the problem posed to the architect. How do you cram as many detached houses as possible into a little square of land and still make them seem attractive? The answer is to vary a few basic designs, and thus create a streetscape with a rhythm that is not strictly repetitive, while at the same time creating a neighborhood that obviously goes together.
The real test is time. For more than a century, every single one of these houses has stood and been loved by its residents. Not one has gone missing. By the most reasonable standard, George Schwan’s project was a success, and Mr. Best certainly got his money’s worth from the architect’s commission.
We’ve seen some of the houses in Seminole Hills already, but we need no excuse to look at a few more. Like the other similar plans in Mount Lebanon, this one delights us with its wide variety of excellent designs.
A demonstration of the variety of scales found in Mission Hills. Above, a grand mansion with a whole village of outbuildings; below, just around the corner, a modest but richly stony Cape Cod.
This typical Colonial, probably from the 1930s, has a typical little round window above the front door. But what do you do if you don’t want a window there anymore?
The Dormont Park Land Company was incorporated in 1927 and almost immediately began offering lots in a little square of land laid out as the Dormont Park plan, right next to Dormont Park, the one big open space in the borough of Dormont. It was an attempt to give the middle classes what the upper classes got from Mission Hills, Virginia Manor, and similar plans in Mount Lebanon: a classy neighborhood of attractive houses of high architectural merit.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 1, 1927.
“Fully restricted, high-class and exclusive”—but within an easy stroll of the streetcar line (as it still is today).
The neighborhood largely delivered on its promise. A few lots remained unbuilt till after the Second World War, and the houses on them are not up to the high standard of the rest. But the majority are designs of merit, obviously designed by some of our best domestic architects. They are more modest than the ones in the big Mount Lebanon plans, but all the same styles are represented, just on a smaller scale.
Many of the houses retain their charming original details, like these deliberately irregular roof slates.
Old Pa Pitt has undertaken to document every house in the plan, and he is already more than two-thirds of the way to the goal. We’ll be seeing some more of Dormont Park, but meanwhile, Father Pitt has established a category for the Dormont Park plan at Wikimedia Commons, where you can see dozens more pictures.
As Father Pitt has remarked more than once, the variety and quality of designs in the Mount Lebanon plans like Mission Hills are constantly delightful. Here is a short stroll down Parkway Drive in Mission Hills.
This one, unusually for the neighborhood, has had paste-on shutters applied to add sophistication to the home. Our friend Dr. Boli wrote an essay about those that generated some interesting responses from his correspondents.
Here is one that has real shutters, with hinges and everything.
Old Pa Pitt is always pleased when an architect understands that a house is a three-dimensional object, not just a façade with a box behind it, and gives it rewardingly different appearances from different angles.
And, finally, here is a bit of good news for the neighborhood and the metropolis:
This new house is replacing a house that vanished a few years ago (for reasons unknown to Father Pitt, who does not always keep up with the news, and perhaps a neighbor can inform us). It has reached the stage where we can judge the design, and it is a good one. Individually it may never be Father Pitt’s favorite house, but as a citizen of the neighborhood it gets everything right. It is of similar height and size to its neighbors, and it honors the historic styles around it—look at those three-over-one Craftsman-style windows—while still being distinctly its own 21st-century self, just as all the other houses in Mission Hills are distinct and original. This is a demonstration of how new buildings can be added to historic neighborhoods.
Lamont Button was a very successful architect of houses for the well-off. Here is an example of his work in the tony automobile suburb of Mission Hills in Mount Lebanon. It’s in very good shape: some additions have been made, but they have been done in sympathy with the original design and would hardly be detected as additions if we did not have a photograph from when the house was new.
This picture comes from the August, 1928, issue of the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club. This comparison shows us with what remarkably good taste the few alterations have been made.
Beech Avenue may be old Pa Pitt’s favorite residential street in the city. It is an eclectic mix of Victorian styles lined up on brick sidewalks, and something about it makes first-time visitors think, “I want to stay here forever.”
A few more houses from the St. Clair Terrace plan in Mount Lebanon. As always in these interwar Mount Lebanon neighborhoods, the variety and quality of the designs are both striking.
This kind of house, with its front door in a cone-capped turret, is known to Pittsburghers as a “Normandy.”
This row of stone-fronted houses is a good example of late-Victorian eclecticism. The heavy rustic stone and elaborate foliage decorations say “Romanesque,” but the porch columns have “modern Ionic” capitals typical of the Renaissance. And it all works together just fine, though it might give an architectural pedant hives.
Hiding in the shadows is a whimsical grotesque face that may remind us of somebody we know.
Note the old address, 185, carved in stone beside the door to what is now 1305 Liverpool Street. The addresses in Manchester changed at about the time Allegheny was taken into Pittsburgh.
The southern side of Rocklynn Place (originally Rockwood Avenue) was part of the St. Clair Terrace plan. The northern side was sold off as individual lots a little bit later in the 1920s, and some splendid houses went up, some of which we see here. The pictures were taken with two different cameras, one of which was set to monochrome just because it makes one think of the picture differently to know that color will not be a factor.
