Murdoch Farms is the plan in Squirrel Hill famous for millionaires’ mansions, but this is the middle-class corner of it. The houses here were also designed by some of our prominent architects, but on a more modest scale. We haven’t identified most of them yet, but we’ll point out the architects we know.
A long stretch of Shady Drive is lined on the southwest side with two rows of double houses, identical except that one row is built of sand-colored brick and the other of sooty dark red brick. Individually the buildings are attractive examples of the typical small Pittsburgh terrace with Mission-style details; as a whole row, they add up to something more impressive. Light snow was falling when we took these pictures a few days ago.
Some of the houses have had their front yards scooped out to make driveways, and a few have added garages in the basement.
We may take it as admitted that the overhangs that decorate the upstairs windows have no practical use at all, since in half the buildings they hang over the bedroom windows and in the other half those are left naked, with an overhang over the small windows that probably look out from the bathrooms. The decorative crests similarly alternate.
The alternating placement of the overhangs and the crests of the buildings actually creates a more regular rhythm in the row, taking into account the spaces between the buildings.
Far and few, far and few
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
A house on Fair Oaks Street in the Murdoch Farms plan, Squirrel Hill. Above, a Moravian arch over the door.
A tiny dead-end street of little houses in a little ravine next to Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church, showing how even the most unlikely holes in the landscape filled up back when Pittsburgh was booming and desperately in need of housing. They appear to have been built all at once, except possibly the little gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial cottage.
Edgemont Street is a one-block street in the southeastern extremity of Mount Washington, according to city planning maps, where Mount Washington, Allentown, and Beltzhoover all come together. It was part of the Grandview Plan of lots, built on the land that had belonged to various members of the Bailey family until the early 1900s. This was a particularly high-class street in the plan, and some of our prominent architects designed houses here, although we have so far positively identified only one. We begin with a close examination of a house that is typical of the first wave of houses on the street, which share certain distinctive features and were probably all designed with the same pencil.
The oval leaded glass in the reception hall would create an impression of prosperity and taste.
These dormers with arched window in the center recur on several of these houses; this one preserves its original shingles. Note also the curled finial at the peak of the roof behind the dormer.
Patterned brickwork marks where the chimney is inside the wall—a kind of decoration we might call a false chimney, or perhaps an expressed chimney.
This house has been divided into apartments and suffered multiple alterations, but the bay flanked by columns is unique and probably original.
One of our architects had fun with this flamboyantly Flemish roofline. The rest of the design is very good early-1900s arts-and-crafts, with most of the original details preserved for now, though they will not survive the next house-flipper.
A Craftsman bungalow, again with many original details preserved, though the original windows (probably 3-over-1) have been replaced.
Probably described by its builder as a Dutch colonial, with a gambrel roof that creates a spacious, almost full-sized third floor. The mismatched bays bother old Pa Pitt. They are not asymmetrical enough for the asymmetry to be a design feature; they look like a failed attempt at symmetry. But it’s still an attractive house and an efficient use of a small lot.
This triple house was designed by Henry Gilchrist, who was responsible for some famous mansions (Robin Hill is a notable example). It may originally have been built as a single residence.1
A later house than most of the others on the street, probably dating from the late 1920s or early 1930s. Siding has replaced what was probably half-timbered stucco, and windows have been replaced, but some of the original details, including an individual interpretation of the popular arch-with-rays, are well preserved, and the house is well taken care of.
The shingles in the gable of this house were replaced long ago with hexagonal asbestos-cement tiles. The word “asbestos” can cause panic, but the best advice from safety experts, even the ones who make their money in asbestos remediation, is to leave stable tiles like these in place, and they will harm no one.
Finally, at the other end of the street, another of those foursquare houses with an arched window in the dormer. This one preserves its original dormer window.
Sunset Hills is a middle-class plan, compared to the upper-crustier Mission Hills or Beverly Heights, but many of its more modest homes were designed by well-known architects, and they form a museum of middle-class styles of the 1920s and 1930s. Here are just a few houses across from Pine Cone Park, a little triangular parklet at the irregular intersection of Parkside Avenue and Sunset Drive.
Walter R. Fleming, a real-estate developer, built himself one of the finest houses in Brookline in 1913. It still stands today, and it’s still a handsome house in spite of multiple alterations, which form a sort of manual of things that can happen to a Pittsburgh house over the course of a century: porches can be filled in, windows can be replaced with different sizes; half-timbered stucco can be covered with aluminum or vinyl; chimneys can be shortened.
This row of houses on Alder Street in Shadyside has been attributed to Frederick Scheibler, Pittsburgh’s most famous home-grown modernist, by the guesswork of certain architectural historians. But Martin Aurand, Scheibler’s biographer, could find no evidence that Scheibler designed them. Then who was responsible for this strikingly modern early-twentieth-century terrace?
Old Pa Pitt is confident that he has the answer. The architect was T. Ed. Cornelius, who lived all his life in Coraopolis but was busy throughout the Pittsburgh area. We can be almost certain of that attribution because the houses in the middle of the row are identical to the ones in the Kleber row in Brighton Heights:
And the Brighton Heights houses were the subject of a photo feature in the Daily Post of March 5, 1916, in which T. Ed. Cornelius is named as the architect.
The Alder Street houses are bookended by larger double houses, one of which—this being Pittsburgh, of course—is an odd shape to fit the odd lot.
So remember the name of T. Ed. (which stands for Thomas Edward) Cornelius when you think of distinctive Pittsburgh architecture. It is quite a compliment to have your work mistaken for Frederick Scheibler’s.
It is the northeastern corner of Shadyside now, but this house was built in the neighborhood that developed around the East Liberty station, which was not far from where the East Liberty station is today—now a busway station, but on the same route. This house was built in the 1880s for a family named McCully, to judge by old maps. It has been divided into three apartments, but it has kept many of its 1880s details.
This entrance is probably a replacement for a front porch that ran the width of the building.
The original carved wooden brackets include the abstract cutout botanical decorations that were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s
Thomas Scott designed this terrace of four houses, built in 1912,1 and they are kept in remarkably fine shape. The updates have been handled with taste and an understanding of the original style, so that today there is hardly a finer Beaux-Arts terrace of cheap little rowhouses in the city. We have talked before about the challenge of making inexpensive housing seem attractive; it was a challenge that Scott met and conquered.
The doors of the two end units are framed in scrupulously proper Doric fashion.
The two inner units have these unique sawed-off arches over their front doors.
