Father Pitt

Tag: Fairy-Tale Style

  • Martha-Marion Apartments, Mount Lebanon

    Martha-Marion apartments

    This fairy-tale palace on Ralston Place preserves most of its charming original details. You will notice right away the most outrageously tall and pointy front gable in the tri-state area (cleverly echoed to give more of an illusion of depth), but after that pause to appreciate the original windows, seldom preserved in apartment buildings of this age, and carefully chosen to balance the other details of the building.

    Entrance

    We have some reason to suspect that the plans came from the office of architect Charles Geisler, prolific producer of small and medium-sized apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, as well as Squirrel Hill and elsewhere. If old Pa Pitt finds more specific documentation, he will confirm or revise this attribution.

    Porch
    Arch
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Some Houses on Standish Boulevard in Seminole Hills, Mount Lebanon

    75

    More houses from Seminole Hills, for which no excuse is needed, since the variety of styles and the imaginative designs speak for themselves.

    Turret
    (more…)

  • Some Houses on Greenridge Lane, Green Tree

    1109 Greenridge Lane

    Most Pittsburghers probably think of Green Tree as the quintessential postwar dormitory suburb. The borough does have a longer history, however, and one small area near the intersection of Greentree Road and Potomac Avenue was built up with unusually fine houses in the 1920s and 1930s. Greenridge Lane is part of that little enclave.

    1109
    1126
    1126
    1126
    1127
    1130
    1130
    1131
    1134
    1134

  • A Rainy Evening in Murdoch Farms, Squirrel Hill

    1311 Bennington Avenue
    Architect: Lamont Button.

    It was rainy and dim, so don’t expect too much of these pictures. But old Pa Pitt happened to be in Squirrel Hill just before dark with half an hour to waste, so he took a walk in the rain in Murdoch Farms, one of the richest parts of Squirrel Hill, and did what he could with the camera.

    5458 Fair Oaks Street
    5462 Fair Oaks Street
    Architect: Edward Crump.
    1200 Bennington Avenue
    1320 Bennington Avenue
    5450 Fair Oaks Street
    5357 Fair Oaks Street
    5357 Fair Oaks Street
    1331 Bennington Avenue
    1310 Bennington Avenue
    5367 Fair Oaks Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Two Demonstration Houses by Paul Scheuneman, Green Tree

    1138 Greentree Road

    In domestic architecture, Paul Scheuneman was a skillful exponent of what old Pa Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style: designs that emphasize a fantastically romantic vision of the past rather than historically accurate architecture.

    The Arkansas Soft Pine Mansion was a demonstration home sponsored by the Pittsburgh Press and the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau. The use of Arkansas soft pine for interior paneling, was, of course, a prominent feature of the house.

    1138 Greentree Road
    1138 Greentree Road

    Across the street is another demonstration house designed by Scheuneman:

    1125 Greentree Road

    “The American Home” opened for inspection in 1935. It was sponsored by the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and General Electric, and of course General Electric appliances were installed wherever electric appliances could be demonstrated.

    The American Home

  • Castle Stanton, East Liberty

    Castle Stanton, front elevation

    Even though it has lost some decorative details over the years, Castle Stanton still drops jaws of passers-by who find themselves in unfamiliar territory here on the border of East Liberty and Highland Park. It looks like a 1920s Hollywood set: we expect Douglas Fairbanks dressed as Robin Hood to leap from an upstairs window and land on his feet after a series of spectacular acrobatics.

    Inscription: Castle Stanton

    This advertisement from the Pittsburgh Press, September 21, 1930, shows us some of the pointy bits that have since been removed.

    Castle Stanton

    This Hollywood front hides an unexpected secret, which will be revealed if we walk around to the side of the building.

    Castle Stanton
    Side of Castle Stanton

    Now we see the outlines of an older Queen Anne mansion, converted to an apartment house by the addition of a Hollywood-fantasy front facing Stanton Avenue.

    Balcony and half-timbering
    Front of the castle
    Front door
    Entrance and porch
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • A Normandy in Shadyside

    Normandy house by J. A. Cornelius

    James A. Cornelius was a developer and builder who designed his own houses. This is what Pittsburghers call a Normandy—a house in the fairy-tale style with a turret entrance. It was meant to be one of a whole block of houses built on the old Liggett estate in Shadyside.

    From the Pittsburgh Press, June 15, 1930.

    Note the photograph of this house, and the house circled on the perspective map. The houses were meant to have their main fronts facing inward, where a landscaped common would make them into a garden community.

    Only this house and the one next door were built, however. It appears that the project fell on hard times—1930 was not the best year to begin a development of luxury houses. The rest of the property, according to researcher David Schwing, was eventually sold to Herman Kamin, who developed apartments on it.

    Turret
    Canon PowerShot SX150IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

  • House by Lamont Button in Mission Hills

    371 Parkway Drive

    Lamont Button was a very successful architect of houses for the well-off. Here is an example of his work in the tony automobile suburb of Mission Hills in Mount Lebanon. It’s in very good shape: some additions have been made, but they have been done in sympathy with the original design and would hardly be detected as additions if we did not have a photograph from when the house was new.

    371 Parkway Drive in 1928

    This picture comes from the August, 1928, issue of the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club. This comparison shows us with what remarkably good taste the few alterations have been made.

    Front of the house
    In the snow
    Perspective view in the snow

  • Fairy-Tale Fantasy in Mount Lebanon

    1247 Washington Road
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    What old Pa Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The mark of the style is an exaggerated historicism in which the historical elements are rendered less as accurate reproductions of historical styles and more as if they were illustrations in a children’s book. This house in the St. Clair Terrace plan in Mount Lebanon is a perfect representative of the style.

    1247 Washington Road
    Washington Road end of the house
    St. Clair Place side of the house
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Louis Brown House, Shadyside

    Louis Brown house
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    Edward Weber was best known for his school designs—notably Central Catholic High School and St. Mark’s School in the McKees Rocks Bottoms. The sense of fairy-tale whimsy he showed in those designs was on full display in this house, which Weber designed for Louis Brown in 1913. It shows the same Jugendstil influence that we identified in the Lilian Henius house in Highland Park, which was designed by our noted early modernists Kiehnel & Elliott; this one is on a grander scale, but if we did not know the architect we would be forgiven for speculating that the two houses were drawn with the same pencil.

    Louis Brown house
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
    704 Amberson Avenue
    Louis Brown house