The 1100 block of Portland Street was built by a company that included the architects Robinson & Winkler, to whom we therefore attribute these unusually florid houses.1 In plan the houses are the usual Pittsburgh Foursquare, but varied with unusual details that make the changing scene a constant delight as we walk up the street.
Just the dormers could form an album for the instruction and amusement of other architects.
Source: Pittsburg Press, September 29, 1905. “The Highland Realty Co. has applied for a Pennsylvania charter. The company has been organized by Architects Charles M. Robinson and George Winkler, Contractors D. M. Fair and the East End Attorneys J. E. Wise and W. E. Minor. Its primary purpose is the building of high-class houses in the East End. Six such residences, to cost about $10,000 each, have already been started by Mr. Fair on the west side of Portland Avenue, near Hampton street, in the North Negley district.” All the houses on both sides of the 1100 block of Portland Street, north of Hampton, are of the same dimensions, with flamboyant details that mark them as probably all the work of the same designers. They appeared between the 1903–1906 layer and the 1910 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps. ↩︎
In 1889, William Smith Fraser, one of our top architects in those days, supervised a whole long block of fifty elegant stone-fronted houses lining both sides of Dinwiddie Street.1
A majority of the houses disappeared over the years; the street came to look like a battle zone, three-quarters abandoned.
But the wheel turned again. About fifteen years ago, Rothschild Doyno Collaborative designed infill housing and refurbished the Fraser houses. The new houses were built at the same scale and setback as the old, and with some of the same massing; the old houses were refurbished with inexpensive materials that matched the new houses.
It’s still not a rich neighborhood. But it’s a beautiful and welcoming streetscape again, and it’s an inspiring example of how an interrupted streetscape can be made whole. The new houses are definitely of our century, but they belong on the street. Without duplicating the Fraser designs, they make themselves at home in the neighborhood.
In this picture, the houses with stone bays in front are some of the original Fraser houses. Their more colorful neighbors are the “infill” houses.
Source: Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, May 29, 1889, p. 246. “The contract for the fifty modern dwellings, previously reported, to be erected on Dinwiddie street by Mr. Lockhart, has been given to Henry Shenck. W. S. Fraser, Seventh street and Penn avenue is the architect. These dwellings will be of brick, with stone fronts, bay windows and porches, and all modern conveniences.” ↩︎
A while ago, Father Pitt took a walk on Thomas Boulevard in the light rain, so don’t be surprised to see raindrops in some of these pictures. Thomas Boulevard, like McPherson Boulevard, has an eclectic mixture of housing from duplexes through Shingle-style mansions to medium-sized apartment buildings. Today we’re concentrating on the houses, some of which are magnificent. Above, a Shingle-style house with all its shingles in place.
If you ever asked yourself how much difference materials really make in the appearance of a house, compare this Shingle-style house, where the shingles have been replaced with fake siding and paste-on shutters, to the one above.
A typical Pittsburgh Renaissance palace that has turned into an apartment building.
A house with Queen Anne outlines that has been modernized with reasonably good taste.
This frame house was in deplorable condition before it was updated and made to look like a product of the twenty-first century. You can look on Google Street View to see the specific meaning old Pa Pitt assigns to “deplorable.” With an unlimited budget, Father Pitt would prefer to restore a house like this to its original design. With a limited budget, this was a good result.
This turret with house attached needs some rescuing. It has what the real-estate people call good bones, and that turret ought to be attractive to a well-off eccentric now that the neighborhood is on the upswing.
A big center-hall house that is now solar-powered.
A stony foursquare with Queen Anne details. It has lost its porch, but the third floor retains fine original woodwork and windows.
A center-hall colonial from early in the Colonial Revival, when Georgian was filtered through a late-Victorian lens.
This is a variation on the same plan as the previous house, which is right next to it; they were probably built at the same time and designed by the same hand. The porch has been replaced with a modern construction that does not quite fit, but the house looks much better with this porch than it would look with no porch at all.
This towering center-hall manse makes spectacular use of Kittanning brick in Frederick Sauer’s favorite color. The beefiness of it, along with the well-balanced selection of picturesque details, makes us think that Sauer is a good suspect for the architect.
This house grew a large balcony when it was turned into a duplex.
A big square house with typical Queen Anne details, especially the little balcony and the curved surfaces covered with shingles.
It is a little hard to date these houses on South 10th Street from old plat maps, and any South Side historians who have good information are earnestly invited to enlighten us. The two on the right end are separate from the rest and slightly larger. A row of houses appears on this land in 1872, belonging to someone named Thomas. In 1882, however, all but the two houses on the right are gone; the rest of the land is vacant. By 1890 the row is full again, still belonging to the Thomas family, except for the last house on the left, which belongs to someone named Todt.
Father Pitt’s best guess, then, is that the two houses on the right date from the Civil War era. The rest of the houses might have burned in about 1880, and were rebuilt in what was still the usual vernacular style for small rowhouses. But this is only a wild guess, and more information would be welcome. It is, after all, possible that the 1882 map was wrong, and the houses never went away.
This fashionably Romanesque house was probably built in the 1890s for a W. Snively. It has been converted to apartments, but the original outlines of the house are still evident. If, by the way, you are embarrassed by the soot stains on the stone of your house, old Pa Pitt suggests overcoming your embarrassment and embracing the history that soot represents. The alternative of painting your stone grey is not a success.
Perrysville Avenue started as a plank road, with tollgates, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it began to fill up as the spine of a pleasant suburban neighborhood of Allegheny. Today Perry Hilltop is a strange mixture of appalling decay and beautiful restoration: it has never quite got off the ground as a trendy neighborhood, but some of the houses have been beautifully preserved. The splendid Dutch Colonial mansion above, for example, is in very good shape. Note the original windows. It was probably built around the turn of the twentieth century.
A Victorian frame house that preserves some of its original details, including the trim around the windows. It appears on an 1882 plat map, so it probably dates from the 1870s.
This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.
This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.
This short block in the North Charles Street Valley has suffered some attrition of houses, but the remaining houses have been restored beautifully and give us a good idea of how the street looked. They were built in about 1887. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation attributes the design to William A. Stone, who would be governor of Pennsylvania ten years later; but Father Pitt suspects Stone may have been the developer rather than the architect.
The houses on the northwest side of the street are tiny but create an impression of prosperity.
The houses on the southeast side of the street are slightly less tiny; they are a little wider, and their mansard roofs give them a full third floor.
This photograph appeared in the fifth exhibition of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club in 1910 (and was reproduced in the catalogue). The house must have seemed quite modern and up to date; it would not have seemed old-fashioned thirty years later. Old Pa Pitt has not studied Mr. Phillips’ career yet, but he was obviously successful enough to build a fine house for himself in a fashionable part of town.
It is cheering to report that the house is still in excellent condition today. A front porch has been added, but with good taste, so that we would hardly guess it had not been part of the original composition.
North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.
We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.
A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.
A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.
Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.
An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.
A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.
A small apartment building.
A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.
Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.
This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.
