Father Pitt

Tag: Domestic Architecture

Aluminum Awnings on the South Side
Awnings used to be a big business in Pittsburgh. The awning men would come to your house in the spring and put canvas awnings over your doors and windows for summer shade, and then in the fall they would come around and take down the awnings and take them away to be cleaned and put in storage, and then in the spring you would get fresh awnings again. (You can still find one or two services that will do that for you.)

Obviously you have to spend some money on this service, and that limited it largely to the upper middle classes and above. When someone had the brilliant idea of making awnings out of cheap aluminum, however, the floodgates were opened, and every working-class house could at least have a little awning over its front door to shelter the residents while they fumbled for their keys in the rain.

On some streets—as here on 24th Street—you can still pass one aluminum awning after another, often a bit bedraggled but still clinging to its house.

These awnings were made by a number of different manufacturers, and they came in a wide variety of shapes.

Aluminum awnings were supposedly open to the objection that, when the sun was beating on them, they created a pocket of hot air under them. (How much of a worry this really is old Pa Pitt could not tell you, but it sounded plausible in the mouth of a salesman.) The problem was supposedly solved, however, by the ingenuity of the Kool Vent Metal Awning Corp. of America,¹ which invented and patented diagonal louvers on the sides of the awning that were supposed to allow the hot air to escape from under the awning—an invention described thus:

An awning adapted to be fastened to a wall or the like support, including a curtain comprising a series of spaced overlapping parallel vertical depending plates, angling outwardly from the awning toward the wall at not more than ninety degrees.

Here we see the diagonal arrangement, designed so that the “vertical depending plates” still provide reasonable shelter from blowing rain but allow air to escape between them. Other awning companies imitated this arrangement, but Kool Vent successfully sued them, enforced its patent, and became the king of the aluminum-awning companies.

The architectural historian Franklin Toker facetiously suggested that the South Side should be declared a Kool Vent Awning historic district, and although other neighborhoods—Bloomfield, for example, and South Oakland—also have large Kool Vent infestations, the South Side probably preserves Kool Vent awnings and their competitors in greater numbers and density than any other neighborhood. All the awnings in this article were found in one block of South 24th Street.
1. At various times the name seems to have been spelled Kool-Vent and Koolvent as well; here we adopt the spelling used in court documents. ↩︎
August 1, 2024
Charette Place, Sewickley

There’s that name again: Charette, indicating to the initiated that something architecturally interesting is going on. A “charette,” as we mentioned when we visited Charette Way downtown, is architects’ slang for a session of intense work to meet a deadline, and the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club for many years was called The Charette.

Charette Place is a small one-street subdivision in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, developed by the firm of Ackley & Bradley in 1941. When it was new, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described it as “unique in that the plot is owned and the homes are planned, built and sold by the architects.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 13, 1941.

These are pleasant little houses, not towering works of genius. They do what they’re supposed to do: they make up a street of economical homes where each house is different, but all go together. Though most of them have gone through various alterations, the neighborhood keeps its unified character.

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July 27, 2024
Some Houses on Washington Road, Mount Lebanon

Four houses at the southern end of the Uptown business district in Mount Lebanon. First is what we might call a center-hall foursquare—the basic foursquare design, but widened to place the reception hall in the center and add a library or second parlor to one side.

It is fairly unusual to find a brick-and-shingle house with the wood shingles still intact, even in a rich neighborhood. Here is one with its original roof, its original shingles, and either its original shutters or good replacements.

Here is a kind of Tudor or English Manor design with a very vertical idea of half-timbering.

Finally, a house of a later generation, probably the late 1920s. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but the second-floor oriel in a front-facing gable was a favorite device of Lamont Button.

Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

July 23, 2024
Coventry Log Cabin, Moon Township

A two-century-old log cabin preserved in a Moon Township park. The Moon Township Historical Society gives us its history: it was built about twelve miles from here in 1825 for John Coventry, a Revolutionary War veteran who would already have been fairly old when he built this house. It was inhabited until the later twentieth century, but by the middle 1970s it was abandoned. It was carefully taken apart, with every piece labeled, and reassembled here in Robin Hill Park on the grounds of the old Nimick mansion (about which more soon).

Note the tool marks on the stone slabs used as steps. Barry Fell would probably have read them as Celtic inscriptions.

A lot of care went into shaping the logs to lock together at the corners.

The chimney is made of irregular local stones skillfully arranged.

You may have noticed this tombstone in front of the cabin if you were looking at the pictures above closely. Father Pitt does not know its story—whether it was moved here with the cabin, or whether it was here before the cabin was reconstructed. Perhaps someone from the Historical Society can enlighten us. The inscription is quite legible in spite of a few missing letters:

HENRY ATEN
DIED
APRIL 11, 1877,
AGED 63 YEARS,
6 MOS. & 16 DA[YS.]

[Ble]ssed are the dead who die in the
[Lo]rd, for they rest from their labors
[a]nd their works do follow them.

Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

July 17, 2024
905 Penn Avenue

Most of us walk right by this building without giving it much thought, but it stands for a momentous transition in the history of the city. According to the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, it is probably the last building constructed as a single-family house in downtown Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh began in the small triangle that is downtown today, and through the first half of the 1800s, a large part of the population remained within those limits. The city was a warren of narrow streets and narrower alleys where little houses crowded with stores and workshops. After the Civil War, though, the land downtown simply became too valuable to build houses on. The family who built this Italianate house on Penn Avenue, where a number of well-to-do families still lived, could not have guessed that they would be the last to build a house in the Triangle, but they would certainly have been aware that the city was changing rapidly.

The Italianate details need a bit of polishing up, but they are still well preserved.

July 12, 2024
Row of Houses, South Side Slopes

Composite of two photographs from a Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

This is the edge of the section locals call Billy Buck Hill, the bulge in the Slopes enclosed by a long loop of South 18th Street. These houses along South 18th Street were built shortly before 1910, according to old maps; they are a little grander than some of their neighbors behind them, and they are good exercises in urban archaeology. Not one of them is in original condition, but we can probably reconstruct what they looked like when they were new by comparing the houses.

First, four out of the five share a blank spot in the wall above the front door that seems unusual. You would expect a window there. The fifth has a window, though it’s an odd oval shape. Nevertheless, that oval window appears to be original. We can tell nothing from the third and fourth houses in the row, which have had their entire fronts replaced with fake stone, but a close look at the first and second houses (enlarge the picture to examine them) shows that the bricks in the front walls have been filled in just where such a window would be, and in a roughly oval shape.

That projecting second-floor window on the fifth house is also unusual, but here old Pa Pitt is inclined to say it is probably not original. It looks like a local contractor’s more modern renovation. The second house is probably the only one that preserves the original shapes of its windows upstairs and downstairs, although the windows themselves have been replaced.

All the dormers have been renovated in various ways, but the ones on the first and fifth houses may be closest to what all the dormers originally looked like.

The first and fifth houses also preserve their original chimneys. Two of the others have lost their tops, and the chimney on the third house has been rebuilt from the same stone substitute that was used for the front.

Three of the houses have aluminum awnings. The ones on the second and third houses are genuine Kool-Vent.

July 6, 2024
Some Houses on Arlington Avenue, Arlington

Arlington is a forgotten neighborhood whose business district has almost disappeared, but it nevertheless has many pleasant residences on its back streets. The spine street, however, was Arlington Avenue, and because it was the main street of the neighborhood, it was where the grandest houses went up. Some of these houses are in very good shape; some are abandoned and being eaten by jungle; and some are in between. The house above is in good shape except for wanting a bit of paint, and its original woodwork is intact.

The round-ended porch is a work of art that ought to be preserved. Father Pitt wonders whether it always had brick pillars, or whether it was originally supported by wooden columns to match the pilasters in the rear. At any rate, the brick pillars are old enough that they match the house brick exactly.

This frame house could also use a bit of paint, but much of its woodwork is well preserved.

This double house is in excellent shape, and almost completely original except for the asphalt shingles on the roof.

Next to that tidy double is a house that probably cannot be rescued. It has been neglected for so long that it never even had a chance to be shrouded in aluminum siding, so its original woodwork, crumbling though it may be, is still there for us to document.

And finally, next to that abandoned house, this neat and well-kept Pittsburgh Foursquare.

We should note that city planning maps make Arlington Avenue the border between Arlington and the South Side Slopes. This is one of those cases where the city’s dogmatic insistence on main streets as neighborhood borders leads to obvious absurdity: it means that the Arlington Playground, Arlington Field, Arlington Spray Park, Arlington Recreation Center, Arlington Baseball Field, and so forth, are not in Arlington. In this case, old Pa Pitt ignores the city’s boundaries and speaks of “Arlington” the way Pittsburghers have always meant it.

Cameras: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6; Sony Alpha 3000 with Industar f/3.5 50mm lens.

June 26, 2024
A Stroll on Markham Drive, Mount Lebanon

Markham Drive in Mount Lebanon is not yet included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District, but it ought to be. It is a street of architecturally distinctive houses, mostly from the 1930s, that are in an extraordinarily fine state of preservation, at least externally. We have already seen one of them: the “Transition House” designed by Brandon Smith to entice conservative home-buyers to accept modern construction methods. Here is a generous album from the rest of the street.

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June 7, 2024
Dwight Avenue Houses in the Dormont Park Plan

The Dormont Park plan was laid out in the late 1920s along three “mere” streets—Windermere, Earlsmere, and Grassmere Avenues, each a block long, along with the intersecting parts of Dormont and Kelton Avenues. Just before the Second World War, the Bupp-Salkeld Company added a row of thirteen houses on Dwight Avenue, parallel to the meres. They are mostly well preserved, and they make up a small museum of middle-class styles at the end of the interwar era.

It would look better with real shutters, but the stonework is still outstandingly picturesque.

Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

May 26, 2024
Transition House, Mount Lebanon

What, you may ask, is a “transition house”? It is a house designed to look traditional but use the most modern construction methods available in 1936. The idea was that the public could be induced to accept modern construction if it came without the modernist offenses against traditional aesthetics. Architect Brandon Smith—best remembered for some extravagant mansions in Fox Chapel—gave it all the decorative flourishes a 1930s suburbanite might expect from a “Colonial,” but under the stone and brick were super-modern materials developed at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research.

Our information and the architect’s drawing above come from an article about the house in the Pittsburgh Press, published when the house was under construction in 1936. The whole article will interest a few architectural historians, so we have transcribed it below.
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May 24, 2024