Tag: Houses

  • E. M. Butz House, Manchester

    E. M. Butz house, Manchester

    Edward M. Butz was a prominent and successful architect of the late 1800s whose reach extended far beyond Pittsburgh. (One notable still-standing public building designed by Butz is the Wicomico County Courthouse in Salisbury, Maryland.) Many years later, in 1936, Maurice Trimble remembered that “Mr. Butz was a veritable human dynamo; he designed among other buildings, the Western Penitentiary, the Uniontown Court House and Jail and many of those snappy Victorian Gothic houses, some of which were cleverly done.”

    One of those snappy Victorian houses was this one. Mr. Butz designed it and lived in it with his family in the late 1870s. The house had an unfortunate renovation in the middle 1900s, with small horizontal windows installed on the second floor in place of the original tall windows; but the current owners have used paint to mask the mismatched brickwork and integrate the original features of the house as much as possible.

    Dormer
    Lintel with incised decoration
    Windows

    Today the ground floor is home to a fancy cocktail bar called “The Lion.”

    Butz house
    Butz house
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

    Comments
  • Some Houses on Cedar Avenue, Dutchtown

    908 Cedar Avenue

    Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.

    Lintel with incised decoration
    Incised decoration
    Roof brackets
    Front door
    906 and 904 Cedar Avenue
    906 and 904
    904
    Balcony and round window
    900

    For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.

    900
    1006 and 1004
    916
    916
    916
    916
    Face on a keystone, 906 Cedar Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    Comments
  • Clara Morris House, Point Breeze

    House on Lexington Avenue

    S. A. Barr was the architect of this house, built in 1894 for Mrs. Clara Morris.1 A woman’s home is her castle, and this one looks as though it might be a very effective defense against Mrs. Morris’ neighbors the Fricks.

    House on Lexington Avenue
    House on Lexington Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    1. The Engineering Record, May 12, 1894: “Lexington av and Tuscarora st. 2-story br and stone dwell; cost, $12,000; o, C M Morris; a, S & A [sic] Barr; b, S J Crooks.” Tuscarora Street was planned to cross Lexington here. Also, Record & Guide, February 14, 1894, p. 75. “Architect S. A. Barr, 42½ Sixth Street, has made plans for a handsome stone and buff brick dwelling, to be erected on Lexington Avenue, for Mrs. Clara Morris.” ↩︎

    Comments
  • A Hillside House in California-Kirkbride

    1102 Sunday Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    This splendidly restored house is in a kind of variant of the Second Empire style that must have seemed very modern when the architect drew it. It has the exuberantly eclectic boundary-crossing details that made Victorian architecture an adventure. Unlike the strict revivalists, Victorian architects like the unknown who designed this house did not consider themselves bound to a pedantically correct interpretation of one period. Unlike the modernists who came after the strict revivalists, the Victorians felt free to pillage their ideas from every historical period. The result could be an atrocity if the pillaging was done without taste, but with taste it could create complex compositions that were like nothing that had been seen before, but were nevertheless in internal harmony.


  • A Whole Street of Scheibler Rowhouses in Brushton

    Inglenook Place rowhouses

    Inglenook Place is something unique: a whole street where all the houses were designed by our noted early modernist Frederick Scheibler. There are two qualifications to be made here: first, one house on the corner of Oakmont Street, addressed to Inglenook Place, is not a Scheibler house; and second, there are two more blocks of Inglenook Place on the map, but they are a stairway with no houses addressed to it.

    Inglenook Place rowhouses

    Here we see, at the end of the row, the one oddball house on the street.

    Inglenook Place rowhouses

    These houses are two of Scheibler’s simplest designs, obviously meant to be built as cheaply as possible; but his modernist instinct is on full display in them. The larger group was built in 1907, all in this straightforward design; a second, smaller group was built in 1909 in a different though also simple design.

    Later houses

    This is slightly less straightforward in that Scheibler has played with the rhythm of four houses in a row by putting the upstairs windows in three groups of 1, 4, 1.

    Pair of houses, one abandoned

    Unfortunately, the neighborhood fell on hard times, and about a third of the houses are abandoned and will probably vanish eventually. When that happens, we’ll lose one more unique streetscape, in spite of the valiant efforts of neighborhood advocates.

    Keep “Our” Block Clean

    This sign is so ancient that it dates from a time when it was normal to do lettering by hand on public signs. A designer of today would be baffled if you said you didn’t want every occurrence of the letter E to look the same: how would you even do that?

    Abandoned house being reclaimed by jungle
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

    Comments
  • Old Houses with New Hats in Dutchtown

    Row of houses in Dutchtown

    This row of houses on Middle Street has a complicated history, and old Pa Pitt is not sure of all the details. A row of four brick houses stood here at least as early as the 1880s. At some point in the 1930s or thereabouts, they appear to have been refaced with yellow and white face brick, and given metal-framed casement windows typical of modernist buildings of the era. It is possible that they were rebuilt, but Father Pitt leans toward saying they were the same houses with new faces, because he recalls noticing what appeared to be older chimneys in plain red brick.

    In 2019, the houses were thoroughly renovated again, with the main parts of the houses restored to the way they would have looked in the 1800s, but a new postpostmodern third floor that gives each house a delightful balcony and a bright upper room.

    Middle Street row
    End of the row
    Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    Comments
  • Row of Houses on East End Avenue, Park Place

    Row of houses on East End Avenue

    Here is a row of houses obviously all put up at the same time and designed by the same hand. In typical Pittsburgh fashion, they are all made of brick, but no two are the same color.

    310 East End Avenue
    Sony Alpha 3000.

    This house, which looks as though it is about to get some restoration work, has lost half its porch, but otherwise preserves most of its features in original condition.


    Comments
  • A Typical Spring Hill House

    House clinging to the side of a hill
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    A hillside house on Spring Hill. Note that the street entrance is on the second floor; the lot plummets downward from the street.

  • Houses on Liverpool Street, Manchester

    Houses on Liverpool Street

    Father Pitt would not hesitate to affirm that this is one of the finest blocks of Second Empire houses in North America. Manchester has had its difficulties, but it has some outstanding streetscapes to show us.

    Houses on Liverpool Street
    Pair of Second Empire houses
    Porches along the sidewalk
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    Comments
  • Italianate House in Larimer

    Old house in Larimer

    This double house, probably built in the 1880s, has had multiple renovations, and some of the vinyl siding has flaked off to reveal the much worse siding that preceded it. Siding has swallowed details of the window and door frames, but the carved roof brackets were grandfathered in with cutouts.

    Old house in Larimer
    Old house in Larimer
    Sony Alpha 3000.

    Comments