Dutch Colonial meets Normandy in an attractively eclectic house that you can see from a long way away, because it perches on the side of a steep hill.
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Hillside House in Carrick
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Victorian Row in Lawrenceville
Separate ownership does funny things to rowhouses. This row of four would have matched originally; some owners have doubled down on the Victorian style, and some have done what they could with modern materials, leading to interesting effects along the property line.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Kodak EasyShare Z1285. -
Textures of the South Side
A street of Georgian rowhouses, all in identical red brick, is a beautiful sight. But there is something jazzy and invigorating about the endless variety of textures in the back streets of the South Side, even if individually some of the artificial sidings people applied to their houses in the twentieth century were never very attractive. The textures are probably best appreciated in black and white, so old Pa Pitt stuck some monochromatic film in his Retinette and went for a walk around the block.
Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film. -
Penn Main
“Penn Main” is the name Pittsburghers give to the district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street, which (this being Pittsburgh) is not the main street of anything. On city planning maps, Penn Avenue is the border between Lawrenceville and Bloomfield; and since the sun was shining on the Lawrenceville side when we visited, all these buildings are counted as being in Lawrenceville for planning purposes. We begin above with a nicely preserved example of a typical small Victorian store with apartment above.
Penn Avenue and Main Street do not meet at a right angle, so the buildings on the corner are forced into odd shapes. The one above deals with its acute angle by blunting the point of it. The one below (seen in a picture from two years ago) has a less offensive obtuse angle to deal with.
The Second Empire style in its Pittsburgh incarnation is common in this section of the city. Little incised designs often decorate the lintels.
This building would have matched its neighbor originally, but at some point the storefront was filled in to make an apartment. Now that Penn Main is becoming a desirable neighborhood, the alteration might be reversed.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Two quite different houses. The one on the left is a duplex, though it may have been built as a single-family house. The one on the right is a kind of lean-to parasite on its larger neighbor, uncharacteristically set back from the street so that it has a front yard and a porch, as if someone was trying to create a little country house in the city.
This picture only: Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This one is getting a going-over. Father Pitt would prefer to see more original-looking windows, but at least the size of the windows has not been altered, and any future owner who feels motivated will be able to replace them with proper double-hung two-over-two sash windows.
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More of Robin Hill, Moon Township
The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.
Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285. More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.
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Milgate Street, Bloomfield
Kodak EasyShare Z1285. These frame houses were built in the 1880s and 1890s. They are detached houses—detached by just enough room for an average person to walk between them. As a group, they form a good document of the things ambitious salesmen could sell to middle-class homeowners in the twentieth century. Not a single one retains its original details: they have all had their siding replaced, and most have smaller windows than the originals. And, of course, several have sprouted aluminum awnings.
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Houses on Goettmann Street, Troy Hill
Composite of three photographs from the Kodak EasyShare Z981. Modest frame houses with spectacular views across the Allegheny.
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Two Houses on Centennial Avenue, Sewickley
Two houses on one of Sewickley’s toniest streets. First, a house with the simple dignity of the Greek Revival.
This house has the form of what old Pa Pitt calls a center-hall foursquare, with details taken from colonial New England.
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Some Houses on Maple Lane, Sewickley
Three houses on one of the many pleasant residential streets in Sewickley. First, a late-Victorian fantasy of Georgian architecture.
This house has probably had some alterations over the years, but it preserves a unique dormer on the side.
Finally, an extravagant riot of gables and dormers.
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House from the 1880s in McKees Rocks
Kodak EasyShare Z1285. In the 1880s, the old Lorenz Hufnagle property was sold off in lots and built over with little frame houses like this.
1890 Hopkins plat map with this house circled. Frame houses are yellow on these maps; brick houses are red. Later, when Island Avenue became a commercial district, the little frame houses were replaced by storefronts and apartment buildings—except this one, which survived almost unaltered. At some point it was sheathed in diamond asbestos-cement shingles, which are nearly perfectly preserved. It would probably cost a fortune to remove them because of the asbestos, but in this stable state they pose no danger.
