Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

Residence of W. L. Phillips, Architect, North Point Breeze

This photograph appeared in the fifth exhibition of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club in 1910 (and was reproduced in the catalogue). The house must have seemed quite modern and up to date; it would not have seemed old-fashioned thirty years later. Old Pa Pitt has not studied Mr. Phillips’ career yet, but he was obviously successful enough to build a fine house for himself in a fashionable part of town.

It is cheering to report that the house is still in excellent condition today. A front porch has been added, but with good taste, so that we would hardly guess it had not been part of the original composition.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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April 8, 2025
A Stroll on McPherson Boulevard, North Point Breeze

North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.

We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.

A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.

A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.

Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.

An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.

A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.

A small apartment building.

A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.

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April 2, 2025
Row of Houses on Charles Street, Knoxville

This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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March 27, 2025
Folk Art in a Gable in Beltzhoover

Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.¹ The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.

Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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March 25, 2025
House by Louis Bellinger in Beltzhoover
For his entire career, Louis A. S. Bellinger was the only Black registered architect in western Pennsylvania. His most famous work today is the Pythian Temple, later the New Granada Theater, on the Hill. This is a much smaller project—a six-room house built in 1929 for a middle-class client.¹ But the client got his money’s worth. It’s not a work of towering genius: it’s just the best house you could get for the money, designed by a man who knew how to take the ordinary Pittsburgh house and make it a little bit special.

The house is abandoned and overgrown, and it will probably not last much longer. It would take a miracle to save it—a miracle that made the location suddenly valuable, since it will require a nearly complete gutting to put the house back in livable shape. All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists now, so that future historians will know that Louis Bellinger made it.

It appears that the house originally had an open porch with an arched entrance; later most of the porch was closed in to make another room. The large window opening in front was a good bit larger when it was an open porch, as we can tell by the slight difference in mortar in the bricks to either side of the window.

Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
1. Source: The Charette, January, 1929, p. 12. “602. Architect: Louis A. S. Bellinger, 525 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: Robert T. Smith. Title: One family dwelling, six rooms and bath. Location: 85 Sylvania Ave. Contract awarded to Vincent Mingers. Contract price: $8700.00.” ↩︎
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March 20, 2025
Two Victorian Rows on Craig Street

Two rows of houses that have adapted to the trendy business atmosphere of South Craig Street. The row above has been adapted with minimal external modifications.

Since old Pa Pitt is a connoisseur of breezeways, he could not neglect this exceptionally fine example.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

This row has been altered a bit more, though some care was taken to preserve its distinctive outlines.

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March 20, 2025
Some Houses in Cochran Place, Mount Lebanon

Cochran Place is a small plan on both sides of Beverly Road next to Cochran Road. These pictures are all from the Cochran Place Addition, which was built up in the late 1920s or early 1930s; all the houses were here by 1934. They are more modest than their near neighbors in Virginia Manor, but they are as rich and varied as any other houses in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. Stone is a very common material here: in fact, stone houses outnumber brick ones in Cochran Place.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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March 6, 2025
A Walk on North Avenue in Manchester

A few weeks ago old Pa Pitt took a wintry walk on North Avenue (which used to be Fayette Street back when it did not run all the way through to North Avenue on the rest of the North Side). He took piles of pictures, and although he published four articles so far from that walk (one, two, three, four), there’s still quite a collection backed up waiting to be published. Thus this very long article, which is a smorgasbord of Victorian domestic architecture with a few other eras thrown in. Above, a pair of Italianate houses. They both preserve the tall windows typical of the high Italianate style; the one on the right still has (or has restored) its two-over-two panes.

Many more pictures…

February 15, 2025
Sciota Street, Bloomfield

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

A typical backstreet Bloomfield row of frame houses, showing almost every treatment working-class Pittsburghers can think of to apply to the exterior of an old house.

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February 12, 2025
Stony Romanesque in the Mexican War Streets

This stone-fronted Romanesque house on North Avenue is decorated with intricate carvings, and Father Pitt would guess that they were probably by Achille Giammartini, who was responsible for most of the best Romanesque decoration in Pittsburgh, and who also decorated the Masonic Hall just up the street.

Kodak EasyShare Z981.

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February 11, 2025