North Hills Estates is a suburban plan in Ross Township just north of West View. It was laid out in 1929, and most of the central part was built up in the 1930s—a period when, surprisingly enough, there was quite a bit of house construction going on in the suburbs. For those who had money, it was considered more economical during the Depression to build a new house, what with the low cost of labor and materials, than to buy an existing one. Thousands of houses sat empty, repossessed by lenders, but meanwhile new suburbs like North Hills Estates filled up with beautiful homes.
This is another article for people who like to scroll through dozens of house designs and marvel at the variety of styles, and at the high quality of almost all the designs.
These two long rows of houses where Beeler Street meets Wilkins Avenue make a striking impression now, but they must have been more striking when they were built in the early 1900s. For several years they sat out in the farmlands of Squirrel Hill, forming a strange urban island (along with two rows of three houses across Beeler Street) in the midst of the otherwise rural East End. We caught them on a dim and rainy evening.
1910 fire-insurance map.
Note how the rhythm of the houses is made more interestingly varied by alternating the peaked and rounded fronts but running the oriels in a series of three.
Acorn Hill is a little enclave in the larger neighborhood known to residents as Observatory Hill, and on city planning maps as Perry North. It has some unusually fine houses in a wide variety of styles, built up over a period of about half a century.
In any neighborhood this one would be an extraordinary house. It would not be out of place in the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony. The porch has been glassed in and the windows in the dormers have been replaced, but the house retains most of its architectural integrity. Father Pitt does not know the architect yet, but among the local architects known to have been influenced by those German and Austrian art magazines that found their way to Pittsburgh we may mention Frederick Scheibler, Kiehnel & Elliott, and Edward Weber.
There’s nothing particularly special about this house, except that it’s a good example of how an architect can vary the incidentals of the usual Pittsburgh Foursquare to produce a pleasing design. The dormer has been altered a bit, but its distinctive central arch remains, though it has been filled with a rectangular stock window.
Most Pittsburghers probably think of Green Tree as the quintessential postwar dormitory suburb. The borough does have a longer history, however, and one small area near the intersection of Greentree Road and Potomac Avenue was built up with unusually fine houses in the 1920s and 1930s. Greenridge Lane is part of that little enclave.
The Highland Park Residential Historic District, which is coextensive with the neighborhood as defined by the city, preserves more good examples of Queen Anne houses than perhaps any other neighborhood, although Shadyside would come in a close second. Here is an especially splendid Queen Anne mansion on Stanton Avenue. (Addendum: This was the home of architect William Smith Fraser, which he designed and built for himself in 1891.1)
This house gives us two common Queen Anne elements that were missing from the mansion above: a turret and curved surfaces in the gable.
Here is a whole row of Queen Anne houses bulging with stubby turrets. They lean toward the Rundbogenstil end of the spectrum, which Father Pitt mentions because he misses no chance to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”
This mansion on Stanton Avenue has been converted to apartments, but its basic outlines remain.
This last one might be better classified as “Stick style,” a closely related style that preceded but overlapped the Queen Anne style. Stick-style houses have more of an emphasis on woodwork, especially boards overlaid on the siding for contrasting trim, as we see here, and less of an emphasis on curves and complexities of form.
It was rainy and dim, so don’t expect too much of these pictures. But old Pa Pitt happened to be in Squirrel Hill just before dark with half an hour to waste, so he took a walk in the rain in Murdoch Farms, one of the richest parts of Squirrel Hill, and did what he could with the camera.
The Shadyside half of Bayard Street is lined with fine houses in a variety of styles. We ambled down one block on a sunny November day, taking pictures of the patterns of light and shadow on the sunny side of the street.
A reader named Tom Slack writes to ask about Pierce Street. “There is a street in Shadyside I’ve always been fascinated with—the block of row houses on Pierce Street—I wondered if you knew anything about the history.”
Old Pa Pitt is always happy to hear from readers, and he was ready to send this one to his article about Pierce Street, with apologies for not knowing any more than is in the article. But he could not find his article on Pierce Street. He distinctly remembered having been to Pierce Street just to photograph those houses, and the pictures turned up when he searched the vast Father Pitt archive. But here it is more than two years after those pictures were taken, and still no article!
Well, we can take care of that right now. Father Pitt regrets to say that he does not know much about these houses, but here is what he does know.
Pierce Street—formerly Parker Street—is a tiny street, two blocks long, that branches off the end of College Street. The rowhouses in the 5800 block are on listed by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation as a historic landmark, and the PHLF tells us that they were built in 1891–1892. Old maps tell us they were owned by A. W. Mellon. This teaches us the valuable lesson that every little investment helps if you want to become the richest family in the world.
From the Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, March 18, 1891: “At Baum Grove, near Roup station, Allegheny Co, about fifty dwellings will be erected by A. W. Mellon, of Pittsburg.” Roup Station was just at the west end of Parker Street. A few of the houses on the southeast side of the street have disappeared, replaced by a parking lot. But the block-long row on the northwest side is still intact.
The houses look tiny from the front, and by any standard they are small houses. Like many of these Pittsburgh terraces, though, they are deeper than you might think. Moreover, they make clever use of the space they do have, as we see in this view of the alley behind one of the rows, where projecting oriels add a few more square feet to the upper floors while still leaving room for rear exits and trash cans.
There is a little mystery about the street name. The street was called Parker Street before the houses were built, and after as well, until the great street-name rationalization after Pittsburgh absorbed the city of Allegheny, when duplicate street names were eliminated. (Renamed streets were usually given a name that began with the same letter, as happened here.) But when the houses were built, a street sign was built into the corner house identifying the street as “College Place.” Father Pitt does not know whether the street was ever renamed, or whether Mr. Mellon expected to be able to wangle a renaming for his new little development and was disappointed. The commercial building at the corner of Ellsworth Avenue and College Street was built at the same time, also on A. W. Mellon property, and it bears an identical stone block identifying College Street as “College Ave.”
