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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are very few houses from the 1700s left in the city of Pittsburgh (though there are quite a few more in the suburbs and countryside nearby), and this one just barely qualifies. Move it a hundred yards and it would be in Crafton, but it is on the Pittsburgh side of that line.
As far as anyone knows, the John Frew house is the only house from the 1700s in the city still in use as a house. The stone section on the right was built in about 1790; the bigger Greek Revival addition was built in about 1840.
Also built in 1790 was the spring house next to the house. In the 1950s, a garage was added to the spring house, and it was done with nearly perfect taste. The garage was designed on the model of the 1840 part of the house, so that the spring house and garage form a sort of reduced mirror image of the main house. Father Pitt does not know who supervised the addition, but our famous architect and preservationist Charles Stotz would have been capable of it.
Some Tudor houses (or “English,” as they were usually called) stick just enough timbers in the stucco to get the message across that this is supposed to be Merrie England. This one is a bravura performance in woodwork. The 1910 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps shows it as owned by A. R. D. Gillespie, who was probably the original owner.
This stone mansion on Acorn Hill, with its eye-catching combination of Gothic and modernist details, was designed by William C. Young and built in 1937.
Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50.
“The above drawing by William C. Young, architect and builder, is of the model home being erected at the intersection of Watsonia Blvd. [now Marshall Road] and Norwood Ave., North Side, for Mr. and Mrs. John H. Phillips by the Young firm. The home is a combination of all that is modern in electrical equipment and labor saving devices with all that is charming and quaint from the old Norman English Architecture.” Old Pa Pitt thinks of “Norman” as implying the English branch of Romanesque rather than Gothic, but he will not argue about the charm.
The steps leading up to the house from Marshall Road are a masterpiece of romanticism in landscape design.
For two blocks, Bausman Street in Knoxville is lined with these houses, which are modest in their dimensions but unusually fine in their design. There are four basic shapes, which repeat in the same order on both sides of the street.
The houses were built for the Knoxville Land Improvement Company as a speculative venture. Father Pitt has not yet discovered who the architect was, but the developers got their money’s worth from these designs.
Knoxville is a bit tattered around the edges at the moment, and a few of these houses have been lost to the ravages of time and poverty—two forces whose destructive power is surpassed only by the even more destructive force of prosperity. The remaining houses ought to be preserved as a document of the best early-twentieth-century styles in middle-class housing, and because, as a streetscape, they are a work of art.
