As we mentioned before, we are attempting to photograph every house in the residential part of Schenley Farms. Here is a big album of houses on Bigelow Boulevard, which becomes a residential street as it winds through the neighborhood. Above, Ledge House, the strikingly different home of A. A. Hamerschlag, the first director of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was designed by Henry Hornbostel, who designed the Carnegie Tech campus and taught at Carnegie Tech. It has recently been cleaned of a century’s worth of industrial soot and restored to its original appearance.
Above and below, the D. Herbert Hostetter, Jr., house, architects Janssen and Abbott. Benno Janssen and his partner abstracted the salient details of the Tudor or “English half-timber” style and reduced it to the essentials, creating a richly Tudory design with no wasted lines.
Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.
Here is a bungalow from the book Pennsylvania Homes, published in 1925 by the Retail Lumber Dealers’ Association of Pennsylvania, which had its headquarters in the Park Building in Pittsburgh.
Some graduate student right now is probably writing a thesis on “The Idea of the Bungalow in Early-Twentieth-Century American Thought.” Certainly there is enough material for a hefty academic treatise. We could probably write a thick book just on the cultural implications of 1920s song titles: “Our Bungalow of Dreams,” “We’ll Build a Bungalow,” “A Little Bungalow,” “A Cozy Little Bungalow” (that’s a different song), “There’s a Bungalow in Dixieland,” “You’re Just the Type for a Bungalow.” And so on.
A “bungalow” in American usage was a house where the rooms were all on the ground level, though often with extra bedrooms in a finished attic. It was the predecessor of the ubiquitous ranch houses of the 1960s. It was associated with the “Craftsman” style promoted by Gustav Stickley and others. Low-pitched roofs, overhanging eaves, and simple arts-and-crafts ornament were typical of the style.
A bungalow in Beechview.The Craftsman-style roof brackets on that bungalow.
What caused American houses to go from predominantly vertical to predominantly horizontal? We will not attempt to answer that question definitively; we have to leave our hypothetical graduate student some material for a thesis. We only offer some suggestions.
First, there are practical advantages to a one-level design. Advertisements often dwell on the number of steps the bungalow saves the busy housewife, which reminds us that middle-class families were beginning to consider the possibility of getting along without servants.
Second, a small bungalow could be built very cheap. It is true that a rowhouse could be built even cheaper, but the bungalow offered the privacy of a detached house. Some of these bungalows were extraordinarily tiny: that book of Pennsylvania Homes featured a “one-room” bungalow, with a tiny kitchen, dressing room, and bathroom, and one “great room” that could become a pair of bedrooms at night by drawing a folding partition across the middle. Most were not quite so tiny: a typical bungalow had a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and one or two bedrooms on the ground floor.
Floor plan of the Vandergrift, a design for a small bungalow.Rendering of the Vandergrift.A similar bungalow in O’Hara Township.
Third, there was the suburban ideal. In the early twentieth century, Americans were persuading themselves that what they wanted was the country life, but with city conveniences—in other words, the suburb. The city did not always have room to spread out horizontally, but the suburbs were more encouraging to horizontality.
Another bungalow in O’Hara Township.
Fourth, the bungalow—as we see in all those songs—earned a place in folklore as the ideal love nest for a young couple. House builders encouraged that line of thinking with a nudge and a wink, and added the helpful incentive that a bungalow for two could be built cheaply with an unfinished attic, and then, as nature took her course, two more bedrooms could be finished upstairs.
Nevertheless, cheapness was not always the main consideration. The bungalow was a fashion, and fashionable families might build fashionable bungalows that were every bit as expensive as more traditional houses, like this generously sized cement bungalow in Beechview, built in 1911 at a cost of about $4,000, which was above the average for Beechview houses, though many cheaper (and more vertical) houses had more living space.
We hope we have given you, our hypothetical graduate student, enough inspiration to make the bungalow an attractive thesis topic. We eagerly await the results of your research.
Frederick Sauer was the architect who designed some of our distinguished churches—St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Mary of the Mount, and St. Stephen’s in Hazelwood, to name three. They are all excellent designs within the conventions of late-Victorian style. The same can be said for the houses and commercial buildings Sauer built.
But in his old age, Sauer settled down on his big hillside property above the town of Aspinwall and started tinkering. Eventually, with his own hands, he built a group of whimsies that are not quite like anything else in the world. None of his clients ever got anything like these: Sauer was a reliable provider of the expected in architecture. But left to himself, he built a landscape from a fairy tale.
This is one of the houses he built, and the hand-crafted chimney above is emblematic of Sauer’s fairy-tale approach to building. The current owner was kind enough to spend a few minutes passing on the latest gossip on the Sauer Buildings. Most were held as rental properties, but they have now been sold off individually, and the new owners are for the most part reversing decades of neglect.
In the 1930s there was a new interest in the architectural past of America. In Pittsburgh, in particular, two related projects made local architects consider the vernacular architecture of the past in a new light. The Buhl Foundation sponsored the Western Pennsylvania Architectural Survey, which gave some of our better architects, thrown out of work by the Depression, the job of surveying and preparing architectural drawings of significant old buildings. A little later on, the federal Historic American Buildings Survey took on similar work, with many of the same architects. This work not only documented our old buildings: it also thoroughly familiarized some of our prominent architects with the old houses of southwestern Pennsylvania. “Their quiet lines and excellent mass are wholly satisfying,” wrote architect Charles Stotz in The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, a sumptuous folio volume that resulted from the Buhl Foundation’s project. “It seems that in the essential qualities of architectural design their builders, curiously enough, were capable of doing no wrong.”
Their rediscovery of local vernacular architecture inspired some of these architects to imitation. This gorgeous house in Virginia Manor, a tony plan in Mt. Lebanon laid out in the 1920s, is one of the best growths from that fertilization. The architect (old Pa Pitt has not found a name yet) very successfully imitated the materials and proportions of a typical southwestern-Pennsylvania stone house, adapting it with seemingly effortless grace to the modern 1930s life of an automobile suburb.
It sounds like a good name for a 1930s Warner Brothers musical, but we’re talking about the Broadway in Beechview, where the streetcars still run on the street. One of the characteristic forms of cheap housing in Pittsburgh streetcar neighborhoods is the rowhouse terrace, where a whole row of houses is built as one building. “This method of building three or six houses under one roof shows a handsome return on the money invested,” as an article about the Kleber row in Brighton Heights put it. In other words, here is a cheap way to get individual houses for the working classes.
Architecturally, it poses an interesting problem. How do you make these things cheap without making them look cheap? In other words, how do you make them architecturally attractive to prospective tenants?
In the row above, we see the simplest and most straightforward answer. The houses are identical, except for each pair being mirror images, which saves a lot of money on plumbing and wiring. The attractiveness is managed by, first of all, making the proportions of the features pleasing, and, second, adding some simple decorations in the brickwork.
Architects (or builders who figured they could do without an architect) often repeated successful designs for cheap housing, making it even cheaper. A few blocks away is an almost identical row.
The wrought-iron porch rails are later replacements, probably from the 1960s or 1970s, but the shape, size, and decorative brickwork are the same, except that here we have nine decorative projections along the cornice instead of five.
Now here is a different solution to the terrace problem:
Here we have two rows of six houses each. Once again, the houses are fundamentally identical, except for half of them being mirror images of the other half. But the architect has varied the front of the building to make a pleasing composition in the Mission style, which was very popular in the South Hills neighborhoods in the early 1900s. Instead of a parade of identical houses, we get a varied streetscape with tastefully applied decorations that are very well preserved in these two rows.
Incidentally, terrace houses like these look tiny from the front, but they often take full advantage of the depth of their lots to provide quite a bit of space inside. They are common in Pittsburgh because they were a good solution to the problem of cheap housing: they gave working families a reasonably sized house of their own that they could afford.
Hoodridge Drive in Mount Lebanon is another one of those streets where every house is a distinguished work of architecture. The variety of styles is not quite as broad as in Mission Hills or Beverly Heights, but the houses at the western end are on a magnificent scale that qualifies them for the term “mansion.”
The eastern half of Hoodridge Drive is more modest, but there are some interesting and distinctive designs among those smaller houses as well. We’ll be returning to this extraordinary street soon.
Domestic architecture veered strongly toward the fantastic in the 1920s and 1930s, as we can see in some of the houses in Seminole Hills, one of several 1920s suburban plans inspired by the success of Mission Hills in Mt. Lebanon. The house above is a perfect example of what old Pa Pitt classifies as the fairy-tale style in architecture.
Once again, though, property owners hired their own architects, so a wonderful variety of styles is represented in the neighborhood.
Beverly Heights is one of several housing plans from the 1920s that make up the Mt. Lebanon Historic District, one of the best-preserved examples of the 1920s automobile suburb in the country. Mission Hills set the pattern: picturesquely curving streets with plenty of open spaces, and matching setbacks for the houses, but otherwise homeowners hired their own architects and exercised their own taste. The result is a pleasing diversity of styles that makes every street an adventure.
Old Pa Pitt is going to be returning to Mount Lebanon a few more times to document the Historic District, so expect more in the coming weeks.
This row of houses is not architecturally spectacular, but it represents something important in the history of Pittsburgh. Originally built in 1865, it was restored in the 1970s by a neighborhood association. Allegheny West set an example of cooperative preservation that has made the neighborhood the attractive place to live it is today, and other neighborhoods took note.
Originally there were six of these houses. They had all decayed badly, but it was the demolition of the two on the end that provoked the Allegheny West Civic Council to act. It was one of the turning points in Pittsburgh history. Would the city become a sea of parking lots surrounding a few big attractions, or would we find clever ways to keep some of the good things we had?
You can read the history of Allegheny West’s successes and failures on the Recent History of Allegheny West page at the Allegheny West site. The story of the McIntosh Row is in Part 5; the site design is too clever by half, so it is not possible to link to that part directly.
We should have put a utility-cable trigger warning at the top of this article, but too late now. The block of St. James Street between Ellsworth Avenue and Pembroke Place is lined with fine houses in an interesting variety of styles, and here are some of them.
It is well known that old Pa Pitt loves good chimney pots, and these are just right for this house.
