This house on Amberson Avenue at Pembroke Place was built in the 1880s; it appears on the map in 1890 as belonging to Mrs. C. H. Spencer. The “stick style” is fairly unusual in Pittsburgh, but this is a magnificent example.
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Spencer House, Shadyside
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Knable House, Shadyside
A tasteful Jacobean house built in 1911, as we know from the date stone over the front door. It seems to have been built for a John E. Knable.
Addendum: The architect was W. F. Struthers, who had formerly been partner with Thomas Hannah.
Architectural historians sometimes use the term “Jacobethan” for a style that is indeterminately Tudor and Jacobean mashed together.
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Georgian Mansion in Shadyside
A large house that probably dates from the 1920s, with a recent expansion in the rear; it was getting all new windows when old Pa Pitt took these pictures.
A “virtual tour” from a year ago, when the house sold for a little less than two million, shows a computer simulation of a thoroughly modernized interior.
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Stair-Step Rowhouses in Oakland
Pittsburgh is full of these little two-storey rowhouses from the first half of the twentieth century. They are often more spacious than they appear, because they are much deeper than you might guess. Like every other kind of building, they have to adapt to Pittsburgh topography, so that, on a sloping street like Louisa Street in Oakland, they end up stair-stepped like this.
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Old Farmhouse, Cranberry Township
This is a typical Pennsylvania I-house with an attractively gingerbreaded front porch. Cranberry Township in Butler County is one of the hottest development zones in the suburbs, but in among the townhouses and shopping centers there are still active farms, and a considerable number of old farmhouses from the middle 1800s. This one could use some touching up here and there, but it might be worth the expense.
The silo in the background at right belonged to a barn that has collapsed.
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Queen Anne House on Neville Avenue
Another remnant of the time when Neville Avenue, now part of the apartment district on the border of Oakland and Shadyside, was a suburban retreat for the well-to-do. In spite of the fire escapes and the loss of its front porch, this house preserves most of its fine detailing, including its exceptionally tall windows.
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Early-20th-Century Rowhouses, Manchester
Update: We are happy to report that the burned-out house has been neatly restored: see new pictures here.
An attractive row of small houses built a little before 1910. One of them has had a fire and is under sentence of condemnation; we hope it can be rescued, but it may not be worth enough to restore. It is only yards from Allegheny West, a very desirable neighborhood; but that neighborhood line is there, and these houses are technically in Manchester.
From the back we can see how a good bit of thought was put into making these houses bright and airy while still using the small space efficiently.
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Milliken Row, Manchester
The tall houses here probably date from the Civil War era, and they were probably built to be rental properties; they appear on our 1872 map as belonging to A. Milliken. Originally there were three pairs of houses and one single on the corner, all matching; one of the pairs has disappeared and been replaced by smaller modern rowhouses. The newer houses do a good job of matching the style of the neighborhood, but they would have done better if they had been built at the same setback from the street. As for the height, it is probably useless to quibble about that. It is old Pa Pitt’s impression that builders of any given era are very dogmatic about the proper height for a ceiling. Look at the third floor of the house on the corner, and compare it to the third floor of the house next to it: you will see at once that modern ceilings are much lower than ceilings from the 1860s, and that is simply the way it is and nothing can be done about it.
This street is now North Avenue, but when these houses were built it was Fayette Avenue; it did not connect to North Avenue until the later twentieth century.
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Second Empire House on Neville Avenue, Oakland
Now apartments, this grand old house, right at the edge of Oakland on the border of Shadyside, is a remnant of the time when what is now the apartment district was a suburban retreat for the well-to-do.
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More of the Tudor Style in Schenley Farms
Father Pitt promised more Tudor-style houses in Schenley Farms, and here they are. We are certainly not finished with the Tudor houses in the neighborhood, but we have made a good beginning.
