Some sights on one side of one block of Western Avenue, the business spine of Allegheny West. Though it has become a trendy and prosperous business district, Western Avenue still keeps its quirky combination of commercial buildings, private houses, and houses turned into commercial buildings.
This is a designated historic district, so that is a historic utility cable.
This is the only house on the street that has not been expensively restored. Much original Italianate detail is left for the next ambitious owner to savor.
Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect of this house on Western Avenue, which looks as though it dates from somewhere around 1890. The carving in the stone trim might have been done by Achille Giammartini, who is known to have decorated many of the houses in Allegheny West.
These brick rowhouses—or double houses with narrow passages between—are a little more substantial than the frame houses on the other side of the street, but they fit with them in scale. The decorated cornices and dormers elevate these houses from common lower-class rowhouses to common middle-class rowhouses, and they have been attractively restored.
The eastern part of Howe Street grew a fine collection of upper-middle-class houses around the turn of the twentieth century. Here are three in three different styles, beginning with a fine Dutch colonial. The entrance has been altered to make the house an apartment building, but otherwise the details are in good shape.
Here is a sturdy foursquare house with Queen Anne details.
Grandview Avenue on Mount Washington is the famous street-with-a-view in Pittsburgh, but the more pretentiously named Rue Grande Vue in Elliott has quite a view, too. Because Elliott is an out-of-the-way West End neighborhood that few Pittsburghers have even heard of, the houses here are modest and—by most standards—affordable.
The name of the street sounds like something a 1950s developer would come up with because you told him “Grandview Avenue” was taken, but in fact it seems to go back at least to the 1880s. It went through some strange permutations. An 1882 plat map shows it as “Rue Grande Vee,” which probably means somebody pronounced it in French and somebody else wrote down what he thought he heard. An 1890 plat map shows it as “Pine Grand Rue.” By the early 1900s, it was Rue Grande Vue in Chartiers Township (later taken into the city) and partly Pinerue and partly Rush Street in the section that had been taken into Pittsburgh. By 1910 the southeastern section was all Pinerue Avenue; the discontinuous northwestern section was still Rue Grande Vue. At some point the southeastern portion changed back to Rue Grande Vue, but the northwestern portion changed to Rudd Street, and old Pa Pitt has exhausted his patience and will not go looking for exactly when those things happened.
Although the street signs say “Rue Grande Vue,” most maps show the street as Rue Grande Vue Street, following the usual American custom of doubling foreign words we don’t understand.
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.
Today the ground floor is home to a fancy cocktail bar called “The Lion.”
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.
For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.
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.
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.” ↩︎
