Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

Row of Houses on Penn Avenue, Strip

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Strip was a chaotic and lively mess of huge industries, small business, and rowhouses. Few of the houses remain; here is one of the surviving rows. These are what old Pa Pitt calls Baltimore-style rowhouses: a row where the houses are all put up as more or less one building, flush up against the sidewalk, with only a set of steps to the front door to separate them from the city outside. These were built as rental houses, probably in the 1890s or very early 1900s; they were still all under the same ownership in 1923, according to old maps. At first they had small back yards on the alley in the rear, but by 1910 those back yards had been filled in with tiny alley houses, which are still there today, and some day when it isn’t so cold old Pa Pitt will walk around to the alley and get their picture, too.

Surprisingly, all the houses in the original group survive. The house on the right end had its front completely rebuilt about ten years ago; the fourth house from the left has had a “picture window” installed in the parlor. The rest of the houses look more or less the way they have always looked.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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January 10, 2025
A Monochromatic Stroll on Firwood Drive in Cedarhurst Manor, Mount Lebanon

Cedarhurst Manor began to fill up in about 1930, though much of it was empty until after the Second World War. The block of Firwood Avenue just off Bower Hill Road has a representative mixture of houses from the 1930s and early 1940s. Since it was a dim day anyway, we present these pictures in black and white, which makes it easy to compare the forms and masses of the houses without being distracted by details of color.

This house seems to have been a builder’s standard design; it is almost identical except in material to the house next to it.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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January 9, 2025
The Blinker House in Murdoch Farms

This house, built in 1925, was designed by Charles Tattersall Ingham, according to an article in the Trib from back in September. Ingham was half of the firm of Ingham & Boyd, a big deal around here—they designed many of our biggest schools, including all the schools in Mount Lebanon for decades. Both Ingham and Boyd had a mania for symmetry. They also had a taste for the classical in architecture, but they disliked columns. It takes all kinds.

But why is it called the “Blinker House”? The Trib article explains that it sits at a very complicated five-way intersection, where years ago there used to be a flashing red light. The blinker is long gone, but Pittsburghers have long memories, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it as the Blinker House.

As of this writing, the house is for sale, and the asking price is a little under 2½ million dollars—down from 2.6 million when the Trib article was written.

Sony Alpha 3000.

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January 8, 2025
Murdoch Farms in the Snow

Murdoch Farms, a dairy farm until the early twentieth century, is the most expensive section of Squirrel Hill. In the 1920s it filled up with mansions designed by our leading architects, and most of them are still in close to original shape, at least on the outside. Father Pitt took a stroll on a dim and snowy afternoon to get a few pictures.

Sony Alpha 3000.

We’ll see more of Murdoch Farms from this same expedition, including some individual houses whose architects old Pa Pitt can identify.

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January 8, 2025
Fairy-Tale Palace in Cedarhurst Manor, Mount Lebanon

This fairy-tale palace, finished in 1930 or 1931, was designed by Paul Scheuneman, whom old Pa Pitt has already pointed out as a skilled practitioner of what we call the fairy-tale style—see these two houses in Green Tree. This one was featured in the Sun-Telly on Washington’s Birthday in 1931:

Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, February 22, 1931. Note how much lighter the stones were when they were new.

“English Design—Caste Brothers, builders, have recently completed this home in Cedarhurst Manor, new residential park on the outskirts of Mt. Lebanon. The architect was Paul R. Scheuneman. Several more homes are being planned.”

Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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January 3, 2025
A Stroll on Glenmore Avenue in Dormont

A few pictures from a very brief walk after a day of rain. Glenmore Avenue may not be quite as tony as Espy Avenue a block away, but it has its share of elegant homes. As in many other streets in Dormont, the elegant homes are mixed in with pleasant little apartment houses and duplexes—a core principle of what old Pa Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development.

We start with a house that, although it is addressed to Glenmore, actually faces the cross street, Lasalle Avenue.

This Tudor seems to present a modest front to LaSalle Avenue, but turning the corner to Glenmore Avenue reveals a long side of dimensions that would almost qualify it for mansion status.

Next to the Tudor mansion, a symmetrical double house arranged as two Dutch Colonial houses back to back.

A typical Pittsburgh duplex—except that the typical Pittsburgh slope of the lot gives it the opportunity for a third apartment in the basement, with a ground-level entrance on the side street, Key Avenue.

An apartment building that looks like many other small apartment buildings in Dormont. They probably all share the same architect: Charles Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed dozens of buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon.

Even though he has walked on Glenmore Avenue many times before, old Pa Pitt never made this association before now. This is a smaller cottage, but it was clearly designed by the same hand that drew this overgrown bungalow on Mattern Avenue:

This is what you get if you tell your architect, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” The house on Glenmore may originally have had stucco and half-timbering like this: there’s no telling what’s under that aluminum siding.

Canon PowerShot A540; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

This striking house in a subdued version of Prairie Style has been rescued from decay, with tiny plastic paste-on shutters as a signifier of a high-class renovation. Here they are installed behind downspouts, which makes them even more conceptually absurd.

More pictures of Glenmore Avenue.

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January 1, 2025
A Stroll on Vernon Drive in Washington Park, Mount Lebanon

Washington Park is one of those 1920s plans in Mount Lebanon that filled up with houses by different architects in different styles, until—like the others—it became a museum of the styles of the era. It’s part of the Mount Lebanon Historic District. This collection is the product of two walks on Vernon Drive, one just yesterday, and one back in May, so don’t be too surprised to see the seasons changing as we stroll.

We begin with an outlier: a Mediterranean villa in a neighborhood where most of the houses range from Georgian to fairy-tale Northern European.

We have dozens more pictures to show you, which we’ll put below the metaphorical fold to keep from weighing down the front page.
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December 28, 2024
Cedarhurst Manor, Mount Lebanon

Cedarhurst Manor is a plan where many of the houses date from the Depression era—a time, as Father Pitt has pointed out before, when there was a good bit of home construction going on, because conventional wisdom held that, if you had the money for a house, it was more economical to take advantage of low labor and materials costs and build a new one than to buy an older house. The plan is not included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District (at least not yet), but many of the houses are distinguished architecturally and well preserved.

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December 21, 2024
Baywood Street, East Liberty

Baywood Street is a typical street of upper-middle-class foursquares in East Liberty, mostly well preserved. Several have been turned into duplexes, but without much damage to the outlines of the house, as in the example below—where you should pay particular attention to the exceptionally fine round oriel on the second floor (and ignore the slightly mutilated dormer). The houses on the northeast side of the 5500 block are all the same dimensions and the same basic design, but with the fronts varied enough to make a pleasing diversity; they seem to have been built all at once at some time between 1903 and 1910, all designed with the same pencil.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

December 18, 2024
The Shingle Style in Thornburg

Thornburg is a small borough in the Chartiers valley where we can find what is probably the best group of Shingle-style houses in the Pittsburgh area. There is some good evidence that most of them were designed by Edward M. Butz, an architect whose most famous work is the Western Penitentiary. The Shingle style is rare in Pittsburgh, and though the houses are in a wide variety of forms, they share certain quirks—the second floor overhanging the first, the use of masonry for the first floor and shingles above, the exaggerated eaves—that suggest the hand of one architect in the different designs.

Sony Alpha 3000.

December 17, 2024