Father Pitt

Tag: Dutch Colonial Architecture

  • A Few Houses on Perrysville Avenue, Perry Hilltop

    2341 Perrysville Avenue

    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.

    2420

    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.

    2420
    2430

    This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.

    2439

    This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.

    2439
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
    Comments

  • Hillside House in Carrick

    15 Wynoka Street
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Dutch Colonial meets Normandy in an attractively eclectic house that you can see from a long way away, because it perches on the side of a steep hill.

  • Two Houses on Pine Road, Sewickley

    529 Pine Road

    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.

    With the grounds
    Perspectiove view
    529 Pine Road
    525 Pine Road

    Here is an elegant Dutch colonial with a fine growth of ivy on one of its chimneys.

    Perspective view from the right
    Perspective view from the left
    525 Pine Road
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

  • W. E. Laughner House, Coraopolis

    W. E. Laughner house

    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.”

    Corner view of the house

    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.

    End of the house with porch and sunroom
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Dutch Colonial in Mount Lebanon

    434 McCully Street

    This little house in the Dutch Colonial style caught Father Pitt’s eye as he was wandering in Mount Lebanon.

    434 McCully Street

    The materials and colors (though certainly not the roofline) reminded old Pa Pitt of a Dutch colonial house in Hurley, New York: the Bevier house at 25 Main Street, built in about 1720.

    Bevier House

    This picture was taken in 2000, but not much has changed, according to photographs on line.

  • Residence for Mr. Edward Kneeland by Charles M. Bartberger

    Charles M. Bartberger’s perspective renderings were featured more than once in the American Architect and Building News. From December 29, 1900—two days before the end of the nineteenth century—comes this very pleasant mansion for a wealthy Pittsburgher. Mr. Bartberger, whose father was the successful architect Charles F. Bartberger (and the two of them are mixed up all over the Internet), had established himself as a reliable designer of houses for the fairly-well-off, and this Dutch-colonial house is a variation on a very common style in the East End neighborhoods: not an adventurous design, but a respectable one. Father Pitt does not know where it was built or whether it still stands, but he will be looking out for a house with those distinctive dormers. (Update: Mr. Edward Kneeland is shown at 5660 Irwin Avenue in Polk’s Pittsburgh Directory for 1905. Irwin Avenue is now Aylesboro Avenue; the house seems to have been replaced with a store and apartment building at some time in the 1920s.)