Baywood Street is a typical street of upper-middle-class foursquares in East Liberty, mostly well preserved. Several have been turned into duplexes, but without much damage to the outlines of the house, as in the example below—where you should pay particular attention to the exceptionally fine round oriel on the second floor (and ignore the slightly mutilated dormer). The houses on the northeast side of the 5500 block are all the same dimensions and the same basic design, but with the fronts varied enough to make a pleasing diversity; they seem to have been built all at once at some time between 1903 and 1910, all designed with the same pencil.
There’s nothing particularly special about this house, except that it’s a good example of how an architect can vary the incidentals of the usual Pittsburgh Foursquare to produce a pleasing design. The dormer has been altered a bit, but its distinctive central arch remains, though it has been filled with a rectangular stock window.
Some variants on the Pittsburgh Foursquare from one block in Beechview. They all have the same basic layout of reception hall, parlor, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor; three or four bedrooms and bathroom on the second floor; and two or more rooms on the third floor. Above, a fairly late version, probably from the 1920s. The lines are simpler and the roof is shallower.
Here is a well-preserved larger version with its original slate roof and multiple dormers. Note the arched window in the dormer. The bay on the left side of the house, which goes up from the dining room into the master bedroom, is very common in Pittsburgh Foursquares of the early 1900s. It allows cross-ventilation and ample light into those rooms in spite of the narrowness of the gap between houses.
This variant without the pyramid roof creates more room in the third floor.
A very large example of the Pittsburgh Foursquare, but the layout of rooms is more or less the same; they are just bigger rooms.
You see them everywhere in Pittsburgh neighborhoods: those big cube-shaped houses with a pyramid roof, a house-wide porch, and a big dormer facing the front.
House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
This is the Pittsburgh Foursquare, the local variety of the American Foursquare. It was a style especially popular, with variations, in the years from about 1890 to about 1930.
House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
These houses are called “foursquare” because they look square, and the ground floor usually has four rooms, counting the reception hall with the grand staircase, which in those civilized days was often the largest room in the house. The stairway usually had a landing with a big art-glass window to impress visitors.
Staircase with stained glass in a Beechview house.
These windows often go missing—sometimes because they are stolen if the house is vacant for a while, and sometimes because, in the middle twentieth century, it was so embarrassingly old-fashioned to have stained glass in one’s house that people either covered the windows with heavy curtains or replaced them with something more in line with modern taste, like glass block. Nevertheless, there are thousands of them still in place in Pittsburgh houses.
On the second floor were three or four bedrooms and a bathroom (and usually a linen closet the size of a small room). The third floor generally had two more full-sized rooms, which might be used as servants’ quarters.
The most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh version is usually a steeper pitch of the roof, allowing more space in the two rooms on the third floor and giving the houses a taller and beefier appearance than the Midwestern varieties of the species. It is also true that the Pittsburgh version is designed to make the best use of narrow city lots, giving the homeowner as much “detached” house as can be squashed into a lot typically thirty feet wide. For that reason, Pittsburgh Foursquares are usually considerably deeper than they are wide. The design is exceptionally efficient in cramming square footage into a city lot, even allowing for the reception hall, which later generations would consider wasted space.
House on Koehler Street in Mount Oliver.
Whole blocks in streetcar neighborhoods of the early 1900s are lined with these houses.
Alton Street, Beechview.Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.Penn Avenue, Mount Oliver.
Though the basic shape varied little, decorative details like the dormer could make the house distinctive.
House on Koehler Street, Mount Oliver.
Pittsburgh Foursquares are built in all materials—frame, brick, stone, and occasionally concrete block.
Four houses at the southern end of the Uptown business district in Mount Lebanon. First is what we might call a center-hall foursquare—the basic foursquare design, but widened to place the reception hall in the center and add a library or second parlor to one side.
It is fairly unusual to find a brick-and-shingle house with the wood shingles still intact, even in a rich neighborhood. Here is one with its original roof, its original shingles, and either its original shutters or good replacements.
Here is a kind of Tudor or English Manor design with a very vertical idea of half-timbering.
Finally, a house of a later generation, probably the late 1920s. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but the second-floor oriel in a front-facing gable was a favorite device of Lamont Button.
A particularly grand version of the Pittsburgh Foursquare house, this house on Negley Avenue at Jackson Street was one of four in a row built in the early 1900s for James Parker, who had a small real-estate empire in the nearby streets.
