Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

Some Houses on Glenmore Avenue, Dormont

Several of these houses have fallen into the hands of house-flippers, which means that they have been made presentable with cheap materials that disguise the architects’ original intentions. But we can be grateful that they were rescued by capitalism from otherwise certain decay and demolition.

We begin with a design that, from certain angles, looks almost like a stretched bungalow. The part that is covered with vinyl siding was probably wood-shingled, although it went through a half-timber-and-stucco period that might also have been the original plan.

Here is a tidy little bungalow with no stretching at all, and it seems to retain almost all its original Arts-and-Crafts style.

Nothing says “flipped house” like vinyl siding and snap-on shutters for the windows. But the twin gables with swooping extended roofline show us the romantic fairy-tale cottage the architect meant this house to be. The top half, again, was probably wood-shingled; more recently it was covered with asbestos-cement shingles.

This unusual house brings more than a hint of the Prairie Style to the back streets of Dormont. Plastic cartoon shutters again, but those could be removed by the next enlightened owner, leaving an exterior almost completely original. The patterned brickwork is eye-catching without being garish.

The sunroom protruding from the front was probably an open porch when the house was built.

More pictures of Glenmore Avenue.

January 25, 2024
Mission Hills in the Snow

Mission Hills in Mount Lebanon was laid out in 1921 as an ideally picturesque automobile suburb. The lots were sold off individually, so that each buyer hired his own architect and builder. The result is a delightful variety of styles that all fit comfortably together. We’ll take a look at a couple of those houses individually later, but right now here is a big album of Mission Hills houses in the snow.

To keep from weighing down the front page, we’ll put the rest of the pictures behind a “read more” link.
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January 22, 2024
Colonial Place

Colonial Place is one of those tiny enclaves all built at once in which Shadyside abounds. This one was built in 1898, and it is unique in that the entrance is flanked by two grand mansions.

George S. Orth was the architect of almost all the houses in Colonial Place. (See if you can guess which house old Pa Pitt thinks was not part of the original plan.) Mr. Orth had a prosperous career designing mansions for the wealthy, as well as some large institutions like the School for Blind Children. But he seems to have been forgotten faster than most Pittsburgh architects. He died in 1918; ten years later, when the architect George Schwan died at 55, his obituary in the Charette had to remind readers who Orth was: “He [Schwan] was trained in the office of George S. Orth, old time architect of Pittsburgh…” That is all the more remarkable because the Charette was the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, of all groups the one that would be most likely to remember George S. Orth.

At any rate, Colonial Place is still a remarkably pleasant little street. The landscaping was done by E. H. Bachman, and the sycamores he planted still shade the street in summer and make a striking avenue in the winter with their stark white branches and trunks.

This mansion is currently the residence of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Pittsburgh.

This one is currently for sale, and you can tour the interior on Google Street View (push the “Browse Street View images” standing-figure button to reveal little blue dots all over the house).

January 21, 2024
Joseph & Elizabeth Horne House, Allegheny West

An early work of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow in Pittsburgh, this house was given the Carol J. Peterson treatment, so that it has its own little book of its history. Old Pa Pitt will not repeat everything the late Ms. Peterson found out about it, but this is the outline: Joseph O. Horne, son of the department-store baron, married Elizabeth Jones, daughter of the steel baron B. F. Jones, and her father had Longfellow, Alden & Harlow design this cozy little Romanesque house for the young couple. It was one of the many houses restored in the late twentieth century by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, and now it looks pretty much the way the architects drew it, minus some erosion and a century of soot.

The decoration on the dormer is a bit eroded, but that probably makes it more picturesque than it was when the house was new.

January 14, 2024
One Side of One Block of Espy Avenue, Dormont

Many well-known architects worked in Dormont, as old Pa Pitt knows from leafing through the construction trade journals of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, those journals are usually maddeningly vague on locations, so it has been hard to identify which house was designed by which architect. But we can appreciate the art even without knowing the name of the artist.

Espy Avenue is a street of particularly fine houses, and the finest block is the one between Potomac Avenue and Lasalle Avenue. Here are a few houses from the northwest side of the street, because the sun happened to be shining on that side when Father Pitt was out walking in Dormont.

Father Pitt will have to come back to Dormont soon when the other side of the street is properly illuminated. But he could not resist taking pictures of this one double house, even with the sun behind it, because it is an exceptional design exceptionally well preserved:

A few bits of wood have been replaced with aluminum, and the brick walls in front of the porch may not be original, but otherwise this grand duplex is probably much as the architect imagined it.

All these pictures were taken to test a Sony camera Father Pitt found in a thrift store for about six dollars. It has a Zeiss lens that seems to live up to its reputation. The resolution is 4 megapixels, but our experiments here at Pa Pitt Labs show that a 4-megapixel picture doubled to 16 megapixels from a camera with a good lens looks better than a 16-megapixel picture from a camera with an indifferent lens.

January 10, 2024
Row of Houses by Carpenter & Crocker, Homewood

This picture was taken a year and a half ago, but it seems it got lost in the press of events, and Father Pitt never published it here. He went looking for it because he had just found the architects: research by the grandson of William Carpenter indicates that these houses on Kelly Street at Collier Street were designed by Carpenter & Crocker in about 1901. They were originally part of a larger group of 24 dwellings, but two other rows—one on Collier Street, the cross street, and one on the alley behind, Fleury Way—have vanished. The building on the corner was probably part of the original row; at any rate, it was in place by 1910, when a fire-insurance map shows a three-storey building here at the end of a row of two-storey buildings. It looks to old Pa Pitt like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense: that is, a bar with rooms above to make it eligible for a “hotel” liquor license.

Two years later, Carpenter & Crocker would design St. James Episcopal Church, now the Church of the Holy Cross, just across Collier Street from these houses. Was the developer a member of the St. James congregation?

January 9, 2024
Graham–Teufel House, Allegheny West

This house has an unusual history, which we take from Carol Peterson’s detailed research at the Allegheny West site. It was built in the early 1860s as a typical modest Pittsburgh rowhouse. In 1918, new owners decided they wanted something less embarrassingly old-fashioned, so they hired the most modern and up-to-date architects—Kiehnel & Elliott—to remodel the house in the most modern and up-to-date style—Spanish Mission. The result is something that would have been right at home in Florida, where Kiehnel and Elliott were beginning a flourishing practice that would persuade them to move to Miami in 1922. It would also have matched the neighborhood aesthetic in many of the new Pittsburgh streetcar suburbs like Carrick or Beechview. It seems a little out of place on Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West.

January 8, 2024
Hoffstot House, Allegheny West

Like many of the houses in Allegheny West, this grand Second Empire house had a detailed history prepared by the late Carol Peterson, so old Pa Pitt will tell you only that it was built in 1880 for Gideon and Mary Hoffstot, and for the rest we can let Ms. Peterson take over.

January 5, 2024
Robert E. Sickenberger House, Beechview
This modest house in Beechview does not stand out a great deal from its neighbors. Its lines seem to be a little more simple, perhaps, but you would not stop to gawk at it when you walked by on the street.

The architect, however, was headed in an interesting direction. H. C. Clepper designed this house for Robert E. Sickenberger in 1914,¹ and he was already flirting with the simplicity of modern style.² Two decades later, Clepper (working for a bigger architectural firm) would be the designer of almost all the ultramodern concrete houses in Swan Acres, “America’s first modern suburb,” most of which still stand today and are still the objects of pilgrimages by architectural historians.

As we have seen many times before, surprisingly interesting bits of architectural history are ready to ambush us from the blandest streets once we know to look for them.
1. Source: The Construction Record, December 6, 1913: “Robert E. Sickenberger, 725 Frick building, is taking bids on the erection of a two-story brick veneer residence to be built on Rockland avenue, Beechview, to cost $4,000. Plans for the building were made by Architect H. C. Clepper, Park building.” R. Sickenberger appears as owner of this house on a 1923 map. ↩︎
2. We should point out, however, that some of the current simplicity may come from later alterations, such as the replacement of some of the trim with aluminum. and alterations to the porch. ↩︎
January 2, 2024
Pittsburgh Foursquare in Highland Park

A particularly grand version of the Pittsburgh Foursquare house, this house on Negley Avenue at Jackson Street was one of four in a row built in the early 1900s for James Parker, who had a small real-estate empire in the nearby streets.

From a 1910 map at Pittsburgh Historic Maps.

All four were almost certainly designed by the same hand, and all four still stand in beautiful condition today.

December 23, 2023