Father Pitt

Tag: Houses

  • A Stroll on McPherson Boulevard, North Point Breeze

    6755 McPherson Boulevard

    North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.

    We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.

    6755
    6753 McPherson Boulevard

    A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.

    Pediment with woodwork
    6745 McPherson Boulevard

    A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.

    6736 McPherson Boulevard

    Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.

    6730

    An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.

    Dormer
    Gable with decorative woodwork
    Decorated bracket
    6730
    6728 and 6726

    A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.

    6728 and 6726
    6723 McPherson Boulevard

    A small apartment building.

    6713 and 6715

    A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.

    6709 and 6711 McPherson Boulevard
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.

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  • Row of Houses on Charles Street, Knoxville

    Houses on Charles Street

    This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.

    424 Charles Street
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • Folk Art in a Gable in Beltzhoover

    602 Beltzhoover Avenue

    Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.1 The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.

    Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.

    602 Beltzhoover Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • Two Victorian Rows on Craig Street

    207–213 South Craig Street

    Two rows of houses that have adapted to the trendy business atmosphere of South Craig Street. The row above has been adapted with minimal external modifications.

    Breezeway

    Since old Pa Pitt is a connoisseur of breezeways, he could not neglect this exceptionally fine example.

    207–213 South Craig Street
    311–315 South Craig Street
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    This row has been altered a bit more, though some care was taken to preserve its distinctive outlines.

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  • Houses on Cola Street, Mount Washington

    Houses on Cola Street

    Cola Street was originally called Coal Street, but at some point there was a transposition of letters. It clings to the edge of Mount Washington, and it was originally built up with the cheapest grade of frame houses. Some of those houses have been adapted to expensive eyries for Pittsburghers who want the most dramatic view of the city; they have been joined by newer houses also specialized for sucking in as much view as possible. Below, a local architect’s own home, perhaps his childhood dream house that he finally prospered enough to build for himself.

    302 Cola Street
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • Some Houses in Cochran Place, Mount Lebanon

    433 Arden Road

    Cochran Place is a small plan on both sides of Beverly Road next to Cochran Road. These pictures are all from the Cochran Place Addition, which was built up in the late 1920s or early 1930s; all the houses were here by 1934. They are more modest than their near neighbors in Virginia Manor, but they are as rich and varied as any other houses in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. Stone is a very common material here: in fact, stone houses outnumber brick ones in Cochran Place.

    433 Arden Road
    441 Arden Road
    441 Arden Road
    200 McCann Place
    200 McCann Place
    200 McCann Place
    460 Arden Road
    464 Arden Road
    464 Arden Road
    121 McCann Place
    120 McCann Place
    120 McCann Place, brickwork
    471 Arden Road
    465 Arden Road
    461 Arden Road
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • A Walk on North Avenue in Manchester

    1337 and 1339 West North Avenue

    A few weeks ago old Pa Pitt took a wintry walk on North Avenue (which used to be Fayette Street back when it did not run all the way through to North Avenue on the rest of the North Side). He took piles of pictures, and although he published four articles so far from that walk (one, two, three, four), there’s still quite a collection backed up waiting to be published. Thus this very long article, which is a smorgasbord of Victorian domestic architecture with a few other eras thrown in. Above, a pair of Italianate houses. They both preserve the tall windows typical of the high Italianate style; the one on the right still has (or has restored) its two-over-two panes.

    1334
    Many more pictures…

  • Sciota Street, Bloomfield

    Houses on Sciota Street in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    A typical backstreet Bloomfield row of frame houses, showing almost every treatment working-class Pittsburghers can think of to apply to the exterior of an old house.

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  • Stony Romanesque in the Mexican War Streets

    208 West North Avenue

    This stone-fronted Romanesque house on North Avenue is decorated with intricate carvings, and Father Pitt would guess that they were probably by Achille Giammartini, who was responsible for most of the best Romanesque decoration in Pittsburgh, and who also decorated the Masonic Hall just up the street.

    Romanesque capital
    Romanesque capital
    Romanesque capital
    Carved ornament and volute
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.
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  • More Houses on North Avenue in the Mexican War Streets

    North Avenue at Palo Alto Street

    A couple of blocks of North Avenue, where we can see some fine Italianate houses of the Civil War era, interspersed with some towering Queen Anne mansions. We start at the corner of Palo Alto Street, where a Queen Anne house makes the most of a tiny lot by going up to a fourth floor.

    400 West North Avenue
    404 and 402

    These two houses share splendid porches, probably added later, since the porches match even though the houses do not. The owners of the houses have coordinated their efforts, so that the porches match.

    410–406

    Three more modest houses, though their full third floors give them a generous allotment of bedrooms.

    418 and 412

    A pair of houses that were both the peak of elegance in different eras. The Italianate one on the right goes for a simpler dignity; the Queen Anne on the left pulls out all the stops to make the most picturesque composition possible. Note the relative heights, by the way: high ceilings were a feature of the Italianate style in better houses, so that the house at left adds one more floor in exactly the same vertical height.

    Seventeen years ago, Father Pitt published a picture of the front door of the house on the right. The picture was taken on 120 film with a folding Agfa Isolette.

    412
    418
    502 and 500

    Two simple and attractive Italianate houses, one of which has grown a partial fourth floor.

    508 and 506

    Here is an interesting document of how the neighborhood has changed. The house at left was originally an Italianate residence; the corner store may have been original or may have been added later. The projecting commercial building next to it, which probably dates from about 1920, was added when the house was taken over by the United States Casket Company, later the Melia Casket Company, which still inhabited the building until about twelve years ago. Both buildings have had a thorough renovation since the casket-makers moved out.

    508
    516–512
    512 and 514

    Two different interpretations of Italianate, one of which has sprouted an inartistic dormer to give it a fourth floor.

    514 and 512
    516

    Finally, a center-hall house in a kind of late Greek Revival style; it occupies a double lot.

    516
    Sony Alpha 3000; Kodak EasyShare Z981.
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