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.
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.
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.
Across the street is another demonstration house designed by Scheuneman:
“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.
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.
This advertisement from the Pittsburgh Press, September 21, 1930, shows us some of the pointy bits that have since been removed.
This Hollywood front hides an unexpected secret, which will be revealed if we walk around to the side of the building.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Built in 1918, this very artistic house was designed for an artist by Kiehnel & Elliott, who applied everything Richard Kiehnel had learned from the German Jugendstil masters and made a kind of modernist Bavarian peasant cottage. Kiehnel & Elliott were among our most interesting early modernists; they would go on to make architectural history by introducing Art Deco to Miami.
