Domestic architecture veered strongly toward the fantastic in the 1920s and 1930s, as we can see in some of the houses in Seminole Hills, one of several 1920s suburban plans inspired by the success of Mission Hills in Mt. Lebanon. The house above is a perfect example of what old Pa Pitt classifies as the fairy-tale style in architecture.
Once again, though, property owners hired their own architects, so a wonderful variety of styles is represented in the neighborhood.
Beverly Heights is one of several housing plans from the 1920s that make up the Mt. Lebanon Historic District, one of the best-preserved examples of the 1920s automobile suburb in the country. Mission Hills set the pattern: picturesquely curving streets with plenty of open spaces, and matching setbacks for the houses, but otherwise homeowners hired their own architects and exercised their own taste. The result is a pleasing diversity of styles that makes every street an adventure.
Old Pa Pitt is going to be returning to Mount Lebanon a few more times to document the Historic District, so expect more in the coming weeks.
This row of houses is not architecturally spectacular, but it represents something important in the history of Pittsburgh. Originally built in 1865, it was restored in the 1970s by a neighborhood association. Allegheny West set an example of cooperative preservation that has made the neighborhood the attractive place to live it is today, and other neighborhoods took note.
Originally there were six of these houses. They had all decayed badly, but it was the demolition of the two on the end that provoked the Allegheny West Civic Council to act. It was one of the turning points in Pittsburgh history. Would the city become a sea of parking lots surrounding a few big attractions, or would we find clever ways to keep some of the good things we had?
You can read the history of Allegheny West’s successes and failures on the Recent History of Allegheny West page at the Allegheny West site. The story of the McIntosh Row is in Part 5; the site design is too clever by half, so it is not possible to link to that part directly.
We should have put a utility-cable trigger warning at the top of this article, but too late now. The block of St. James Street between Ellsworth Avenue and Pembroke Place is lined with fine houses in an interesting variety of styles, and here are some of them.
It is well known that old Pa Pitt loves good chimney pots, and these are just right for this house.
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historic marker at the entrance tells us all Father Pitt knows about St. James Terrace: that it was built in 1915, and that the builder was John E. Born. Perhaps we will discover the architect one of these days.
St. James Terrace is an enclave within an enclave: it branches off the narrow dead-end St. James Place, but with no access for vehicles. Instead, the houses are arranged around a narrow but beautiful garden court, which looks very romantic in the snow.
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.
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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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).
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.
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.
