You can make good money as a lawyer if you make the right contacts. Willis McCook was lawyer to the robber barons, and he lived among them in this splendid Gothic mansion on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row. The architects were the local firm of Carpenter & Crocker. It is now a hotel called the “Mansions on Fifth,” along with the house around the corner that McCook built for his daughter and son-in-law.
This exceptionally fine Second Empire house sits at the end of a row, and therefore has two exposed surfaces for the architect to play with. Victorian architects did not like plain flat surfaces, and whoever designed this house lost no opportunity to vary the shape and texture.
There are many houses of this age in East Birmingham, the section of the South Side between 17th and 27th Streets that was laid out in the middle 1800s. Most of them are anonymous and unremarked. This one, however, has a specific date and pedigree, according to a sign placed on it when it was renovated thirty years ago:
We notice the choice of the word “renovated” rather than “restored,” which is appropriate. The details are a little off for the age of the house, particularly the windows and doorway. Old Pa Pitt suspects that the house had already been altered that way, and the new owners worked with what they had to make the exterior look attractive if not historically correct. At any rate, hundreds of houses on the South Side are in similar shape, but few of them have a known date and history.
Many styles of houses line the quiet, pleasant streets of Schenley Farms, but the neighborhood has an unusual concentration of small Italian Renaissance palaces.
In the South Side, 17th Street is the line between Old Birmingham and New Birmingham: you can tell because the street grid is broken at that point, and east-west streets have to jog to continue on their way. This house is on the Old Birmingham side.
This house in Schenley Farms has had a thorough cleaning and looks just built. It has also lost a large and perhaps obstructive tree. Compare the picture above to the one below, which Father Pitt took in 2014:
Addendum: This house, known as “Ledge House,” was designed by Henry Hornbostel. It was the home of Arthur Hamerschlag, for whom Hamerschlag Hall was named.
This is the kind of eclectic mess twentieth-century architects meant when they vigorously condemned everything “Victorian.” You can hardly pin it down to any historical style. That would probably identify it as “Queen Anne,” the term for Victorian domestic architecture that is a hodgepodge of every historical style, with strange angles thrown in for added picturesque effect. And to those twentieth-century architects, old Pa Pitt has only this to say: this house is a lot more attractive and a lot more pleasant to live in than anything you came up with.
Some typically elegant Victorian brick houses on Sidney Street between 23rd and 24th.
Side-by-side duplexes are often built to give the impression of a single elegant house; but over the years, separate ownership can destroy the illusion, as it has done in the left-hand pair, where one half has been modernized without regard to the appearance of the whole.
Dormers with carved and painted decorations on a Second-Empire-style house at Jane and 28th Streets, South Side.
