Two houses on Walnut Street in the Tudor Revival style, as we would say today, or the English style, as they were probably called when they were built. They share some notable similarities, which would make it not surprising if they were drawn by the same architect. The sunset light makes the already cozy Tudor style look even warmer and cozier.
Addendum: A city architectural survey attributes the one above to the architect Thomas Scott; we are probably justified in attributing its neighbor to Scott as well.
Broad Street is one of the two main streets of central Sewickley. It is lined with public buildings (churches, post office, school) and a wide variety of houses. This dignified Queen Anne is a good introduction to the street.
This center-hall frame house has been remodeled to someone’s ideal of picture-postcard Victorian perfection. Until a few years ago, it was asymmetrical and had no front porch or Victorian Gothic peak in the front.
A center-hall Georgian house of the early twentieth century, probably built as the manse for the Methodist church next door.
An elegant Second Empire house whose porch wraps around to become a porte cochère.
A beautiful shingle-style mansion belonging to St. Stephen’s Anglican Church next door.
There are also some modest houses among the mansions, like this charming little I-house with real wood siding.
Pine Road is a short street in a very tony section of Sewickley. Here are two fine houses in very different styles. First we have an Italianate house, probably dating from the 1880s or so.
Here is an elegant Dutch colonial with a fine growth of ivy on one of its chimneys.
Three quite different interpretations of the Queen Anne turret on Shadyside houses. Above, a pair of faceted turrets on a double house.
An unusual rectangular turret preserves its original farmhouse-Gothic window and woodwork. The turret itself is set at a 45° angle to the rest of the house.
Finally, an octagonal domed turret on a house whose well-preserved details are worth pausing to admire. We note in passing that even the paint is, if not original, at least the dark green color typical of Pittsburgh houses of the turn of the twentieth century: you can scratch the trim of many a Pittsburgh house and find this color at the lowest level.
An appropriate arrangement of birds on those cables could make a short musical composition.
A shingly front porch that survived the epidemic of porch amputations in the 1960s and 1970s.
The parlor window has some good stained glass under the arch and, in the arch itself, a sunflower ornament for a keystone.
T. Ed. (for Thomas Edward) Cornelius was a successful second-string architect who was born in Coraopolis and lived there all his life. He had more of an eye for current trends than many of his kind: we have seen his “modern” Craftsman-style rowhouses in Brighton Heights (and duplicated in Shadyside, Bloomfield, and elsewhere around the city), his Craftsman-Gothic Beechview Christian Church, and his splendidly Art Deco Coraopolis VFW Post. This was Mr. Cornelius’ own house, where he was was living at the end of his life; he died in 1950, probably at an advanced age. We may guess that he designed the house for himself.
The front door is a version of the rayed arch that was popular in domestic architecture in the late 1920s and into the 1930s.
The house is on Ferree Street, named for one of the founding families of Coraopolis. T. Ed.’s wife was Lily Ferree Cornelius. Good connections never hurt an architect.
The “Queen Anne” style is the one people think of most often when they think of Victorian houses. It had very little to do with any queen named Anne. Its defining characteristic is a concern for variety and picturesqueness: there is always a surprise lurking around the corner of a Queen Anne house. Turrets and Dutch gables and curiously shaped dormers and fits of Renaissance detailing are favorite devices of Queen Anne architects, but there is no single thing that defines the style.
Coraopolis has an exceptionally fine collection of Queen Anne houses, and some of them preserve exquisite details usually lost to the ravages of time. Enlarge the picture above, for example, and admire the original windows.
This one has had many revisions over the years, but the irregular shape of a Queen Anne house, and the dominant turret, are still there to mark the style.
Here is a house that has kept many elegant details, including its slate roof and wood trim. And note the windows in the turret:
The glass curves to match the curve of the wall.
A curious dormer with remarkable tracery in the window.
Another house with some alterations, but they do not disguise the turret and the big rounded bay in front.
This house has also been through some alterations: the porch might have wrapped all the way around to include both doors, and the vertical siding on the second-floor oriel doubtless replaced wood shingles. The shingles are still there on the third-floor gables, however.
The whole length of Kenmont Avenue is included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. The southern half of the street has some charming cottages from the 1920s or so, and as a bonus one of the oldest houses in Mount Lebanon.
This is the old house: the Dr. Joseph McCormick house, built before the Civil War, as the hand-lettered plaque from the Mount Lebanon Historical Society tells us.
Old Pa Pitt knows exactly two things about the architect W. E. Laughner: first, that he had his office in the Ohio Valley Trust Building; second, that he designed this house for his own home. Both facts come from one small listing in the American Contractor for July 14, 1923: “Coraopolis, Pa.—Res. 2½ sty. & bas. Ridge av. Archt. W. E. Laughner, Ohio Valley Trust bldg. Owner W. E. Laughner, Ridge & Chestnut sts. Brk. veneer. Drawing plans.”
At any rate, this is an interesting variant on the Dutch Colonial style, with Arts-and-Crafts details that make it stand out from its neighbors. It was a good advertisement for Mr. Laughner’s architectural practice, and we suspect there are many Laughner houses lurking here and there waiting for us to discover.
An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.
