The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.
More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.
Two houses on one of Sewickley’s toniest streets. First, a house with the simple dignity of the Greek Revival.
This house has the form of what old Pa Pitt calls a center-hall foursquare, with details taken from colonial New England.
The Negley was probably built in about 1909; the architects were the firm of Janssen & Abbott. Some of the original details have vanished over the years, but Benno Janssen’s spare version of Georgian style still leaves an impression of dignity and elegance.
An unusual choice: the doorway frames are cast iron.
Sewickley is known for its grand houses, and some of the grandest are along Beaver Street, the main street of the village.
Addendum: This one is the Edward O’Neil house, designed by Rutan & Russell.1
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1281; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
Old Pa Pitt had intended to place this picture with the rest of the pictures of Robin Hill the other day, but his automatic stitching software failed him. He had been reasonably careful in taking the three photographs so that they would line up nearly perfectly, but the stitching software produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry. What went wrong? Only because Father Pitt was stubborn enough to edit the “control points” himself—“control points” being identical features marked in two pictures, so that the software knows how to align them properly—did he discover the problem. The parade of identical windows was too much for the program. The extreme symmetry caused it to identify this window as the same as that window, which caused the whole building to collapse in a heap.
So old Pa Pitt stubbornly picked out all the control points himself, and produced a nearly perfect rendering of the garden side of the mansion. Stubbornness is a character flaw, but it has its uses.
Robin Hill was designed for Francis and Mary Nimick by Henry Gilchrist. He gave them a classic Georgian country house, and, like many country houses, it is really meant to be enjoyed from the garden side.
The house was built in 1926, and for nearly half a century the Nimicks enjoyed it. When Mary died in 1971, she willed the whole estate to the township to be preserved as a park.
The front of the house presents a dignified appearance to the visitor.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Sony Alpha 3000; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.
Now the Historic State Avenue Apartments, this old YMCA was designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1910. The style is a rich Georgian that makes the place look like a high-class resort hotel.
Even the alcoves for trash and utility equipment have a rich Colonial look.
Men’s clubs live in terror of windows, which they gradually block up with glass blocks, bricks, or whatever else is handy. But the outlines of this dignified clubhouse remain as the architect drew them. It was designed in 1924 by Edward B. Lee, replacing an earlier lodge (designed by William E. Snaman) that had been destroyed by fire.
The style is noticeably similar to the style of the Americus Republican Club, also by Lee. The buildings are radically different shapes, but Lee applied the same design vocabulary to make both clubs look respectable in their different locations.
What, you may ask, is a “transition house”? It is a house designed to look traditional but use the most modern construction methods available in 1936. The idea was that the public could be induced to accept modern construction if it came without the modernist offenses against traditional aesthetics. Architect Brandon Smith—best remembered for some extravagant mansions in Fox Chapel—gave it all the decorative flourishes a 1930s suburbanite might expect from a “Colonial,” but under the stone and brick were super-modern materials developed at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research.
Our information and the architect’s drawing above come from an article about the house in the Pittsburgh Press, published when the house was under construction in 1936. The whole article will interest a few architectural historians, so we have transcribed it below.
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The Rose Court apartments were built in about 1928 or 1929, and they have hardly changed at all externally. They are a complex of seven buildings in the Central Square area of Mount Lebanon, built in a subdued Georgian style around pleasant garden courts, so that one side of each building faces a garden.
