A charming little house in an out-of-the-way alley on the South Side.
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Alley House
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Perma-Stone: old Pa Pitt calls them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are the four most common artificial sidings applied to Pittsburgh houses, especially frame houses. (But not exclusively frame houses: siding salesmen were aggressive enough to go for brick houses if they sensed weakness in the buyer.) They are responsible for more uglification in the city than any other single force. That is not to say that it is impossible to use them well, only that they are almost never used well. We can find perfect illustrations within a block of each other on the South Side.
Aluminum is usually easy to recognize by the rust stains, which probably come from the fasteners rather than the aluminum itself.
Vinyl siding is the closest in appearance to wood siding, and if applied well can be hard to distinguish from a distance. But instead of removing the wood siding and replacing it with vinyl, the contractors usually stick the vinyl over the wood siding. That means two bad things: first, that there is an invisible layer of decaying wood; second, that all the trim on the house is swallowed up, leaving the house a cartoon shell. In the picture above, the whole process has been taken to its logical conclusion in the right-hand house. A good deal of money was spent on new windows in the wrongest possible shapes, vinyl trim, and paste-on fake shutters that could not possibly cover the windows, leaving the house an expensive architectural wreck.
Insulbrick is a trademark name (though there were disputes over the trademark) for siding made up of asphalt sheets stamped with a brick pattern. When the siding is new, it looks as if a child drew bricks on the house with crayons. When it is older, it looks like the picture above. In spite of the name, it is very bad at insulating.
Perma-Stone is another trademark name: it is siding that imitates stonework, once again in a cartoonish fashion.
Sometimes more than one of these sidings can grow on a house, either because the owner loved variety, or because different generations attacked different maintenance problems in different halfhearted ways.
Insulbrick and vinyl.
Aluminum and Perma-Stone.
If you are the owner of a frame house that still has wooden siding, congratulations! You are a member of a small elite minority in Pittsburgh. Keep a good coat of paint on that siding, and attack problems while they are still young, and you will keep your house beautiful for generations to come.
If the time comes to replace that siding, though, consider the long term. Contractors will tell you that their artificial sidings will last forever. Look around you. You can see that they are misinformed. Consider replacing wood with wood, or—if wood is not in your budget—consider replacing it with vinyl rather than covering it over with vinyl.
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Rhodes Mansion, Allegheny West
Does anyone know the history of this house? A twenty-year-old Post-Gazette article describes the restoration challenges that would have awaited a new owner; Father Pitt does not know the history of the house since then, and he thinks the article may be incorrect about the history before that. The Post-Gazette article says it was built for steel magnate Joshua Rhodes; but the Joshua Rhodes who turns up in every other search lived on Western Avenue and certainly did not have a 32-year-old wife in the early 1900s, which the article says was Grace Rhodes’ age when she died of a brain tumor not long after the house was built. Joshua Rhodes might have built this house for one of his sons; that is old Pa Pitt’s best hypothesis. William B. Rhodes would have been 39 in 1903; Walter J. Rhodes would have been 31. Either one of them might plausibly have had a wife in her thirties in the early 1900s.
Almost all the surviving great houses in Allegheny West have either been repurposed as institutional or office buildings or restored as grand mansions once again. This Tudor palace, however, seems to be in need of a bit of help. Clearly the exterior is in good shape, though the front lawn is not maintained much this year. A suburban doctor’s house would probably cost less than this 40-room mansion. Who’s ready for a do-it-yourself adventure?
The decorative shield over the front door looks from a distance as though it once bore an inscription, but as far as old Pa Pitt can tell it was always decorated with horizontal ridges alone.
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Second-Empire Row in Allegheny West
A splendid row of Second Empire houses on Lincoln Avenue, with their wood trim picked out in tasteful polychrome paint. They were built in 1872 and 1873.
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A Walk on the South Side with a Black-and-White Camera
Corner of 16th and Sarah Streets. It was not really a black-and-white camera; it was old Pa Pitt’s nineteen-year-old Samsung Digimax V4, a strange beast that was made for photography enthusiasts who wanted something that would fit in the pocket but still had most of the options of a sophisticated enthusiast’s camera. Father Pitt has set the user options to black-and-white. There is no good reason for doing so: obviously the camera collects color data and throws the colors away, and the colors could just as well be thrown away in software after returning from the expedition. But knowing that the picture must be black and white forces one to think in terms of forms rather than colors. So here are half a dozen pictures from a walk through the South Side Flats.
Building on 17th Street, probably from the 1920s. 
The entrance to St. Adalbert’s Church. 
St. Adalbert’s rectory. 
Rowhouses on Sarah Street. 
Front steps. -
Tito-Mecca-Zizza House, Uptown
Uptown is a strange neighborhood right now. A lot of development is going on, and a lot of decay is going on, and they are going on in the same blocks. This house is obviously not in perfect shape at the moment, but it was just recently declared a city historic landmark—partly for its architecture, but mostly for its associations.
Joe Tito was a bootlegger during Prohibition; when Prohibition ended, he invested the proceeds of his crimes in what was now legitimate business and bought the Latrobe Brewing Company, which had existed before Prohibition but had been closed for years. In 1939 he introduced the Rolling Rock brand, which was brewed in Latrobe until it was bought and moved to New Jersey. (Latrobe, currently owned by the City Brewing Company of Wisconsin, now brews Iron City and Stoney’s and other contract brews.)
Joe’s best friend in the world was Gus Greenlee, the Black entertainment magnate from the Hill famous in jazz legend as the owner of the Crawford Grill. Mr. Greenlee bought the equally legendary Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team, and Mr. Tito invested in it.
The historic designation for this house came after much acrimonious debate. The owner of the property opposed it, since the house itself is not valuable but the property stands in an area that may soon be desirable. Some of the other opponents opposed on the grounds that the house was associated with organized crime, which suggests a strange view of what constitutes “history”: it is something like saying that the Marne should not be a historic battlefield because it is associated with the Kaiser. If historic buildings cannot be associated with sinners, then the only city with any historic buildings at all will be the New Jerusalem.
Now that it’s historic, what is to be done with this house? That is the interesting question. Uptown is rapidly developing as a neighborhood of urban loft apartments; is there any room for a single-family house? Is the house big enough to divide into profitable apartments? Or will it mysteriously catch fire some night?
We should note that Fifth Avenue is the dividing line between neighborhoods on city planning maps, which technically puts this house in the Crawford-Roberts section of the Hill. Ordinary Pittsburghers think of both sides of Fifth Avenue as Uptown, however, and most of the media reports about this house have mentioned Uptown as the neighborhood.
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Civil-War-Era Houses on 15th Street, South Side
These three buildings date from before 1872, since they appear on our 1872 map. The two exceptionally large houses on the left look like Civil War engravings of street scenes. Some of the details, like the gutters, have changed, but the overall appearance is very 1860s. The smaller frame house on the right has suffered every external indignity a house can suffer, but the simple shape with narrow projecting dormer still says middle 1800s.
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Row of Houses on 13th Street, South Side
From both the old maps and the style it seems fairly certain that this row of four identical houses dates from before 1872. On the whole they are very well preserved, with a few alterations, but nothing to change the essentials.
The larger house on the end probably dates from before 1872 as well, although it looks newer than its neighbors; its original front is mostly intact, but it has sprouted an ugly third floor that could be removed or rebuilt by some future owner.
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Condemned Row from the Civil War Era
Uptown is a good-news/bad-news sort of neighborhood right now. The good news is that, after decades of gradual abandonment and decay, the neighborhood is rapidly turning upward. The bad news is that much of the neighborhood is still in danger. The Soho end of Uptown, near the Birmingham Bridge, is not yet feeling the effects of the prosperity radiating from the new arena, the restoration of Fifth Avenue High School, and the proximity of downtown to the western end of Uptown.
Here is a row of houses on Seneca Street that probably will not be here much longer. The blue CONDEMNATION stickers have appeared on several of them. These are houses from the Civil War era, which are not as common as they used to be. A few more such rows remain Uptown, and some of those are also in danger—either from decay or from the even more dangerous force of prosperity. On two of these houses, the façades have been replaced with architecturally worthless curtains of brick; but the remaining four retain many of their original features.
Until recently, it was inevitable that condemned houses like these would be razed to leave an empty space behind them. Now it is just possible that at least the space will not be empty forever. That would be moderately good news; unfortunately, the rolling waves of prosperity will not reach Seneca Street in time to make it profitable to save these houses. A century and a half of history will vanish, and almost no one will notice. But at least these pictures will serve as a memorial and a document.
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Frame Houses of the Civil War Era
It is remarkable how unremarkable these two tiny houses on 24th Street are. The one on the left has had its parlor windows replaced with the usual mid-twentieth-century picture window, but most of the rest of the detail is intact; the one on the right probably looks not much different from the day it was built. And it was built at about the time of the Civil War or right after. These two houses appear on maps all the way back to 1872, the earliest detailed map of the area Father Pitt has been able to find. Brick houses from that time are common, but tiny frame houses like these seldom survive with original (or equivalent) wooden siding, which is almost always replaced with one of the Four Horsemen: aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Perma-Stone. If old Pa Pitt were dictator (and let it be known that if chosen dictator he would not serve), he would make these two houses a preservation priority.
In the picture below, note the size of the houses relative to the cars parked in front of them.
