North Avenue between Federal Street and Allegheny General Hospital is a mixture of domestic buildings, with a couple of commercial buildings thrown in. We begin at Federal Street with a building that seems to have a story to tell us. Thirty years ago, this corner was the sort of place that Pittsburghers warned each other to stay away from. Now there’s a branch of Yinz Coffee here, and the district is filling in with shops and residents. But this building is only a quarter of its old self: old maps show a building with four floors here, and this is almost certainly that building with three of its floors amputated.
There was construction going on along the street when old Pa Pitt took his walk there, so you’ll have to forgive some debris in the pictures.
This building has apparently lost some elaborate Italianate trim around the windows. Ordinarily, Father Pitt prefers to see bricks left unpainted, but here is a case where painting the front would eliminate some ugly scars.
This looks like a narrow house that was early on extended by one bay, possibly when it was converted to apartments.
Now we come to an eclectic row of houses in a number of different styles from different eras.
This stone-fronted Romanesque house (it’s brick on the sides that don’t face the street) literally stands out in its row, thanks to a big turret that bulges out beyond the front walls of the rest of the houses.
The Aberlie house, which was probably built in about 1880, has its own Wikipedia article, which tells us that it is the Abelie House and was probably built in about 1880.
A frame Victorian house of the sort that makes Shadyside such a pleasant neighborhood to go walking in. Various alterations have been made, but they have been in sympathy with the original design.
“National attention will probably be focused on Swan Acres, for it is the first community in the country in which homes are exclusively of modern design,” said a puffing two-page feature in the Press for August 23, 1936.
The drawing above, which we have little trouble recognizing as the house in our photograph, was published with the feature to show what the houses would look like. Harry Pople of Beck, Pople & Beck, the builders and planners, explained that “many a well-proportioned modern-style home looks out of place when surrounded by homes of a traditional architectural style. Builders of modern style homes in Swan Acres will be protected against such encroachment. None but modern style homes will be permitted.”
Another drawing shows the house that would be built next door to the first one. The designer was Quentin S. Beck, a young student of architecture who was not technically a registered architect. (In fact, he would not be registered until 1951.) Young Beck had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Penn State in 1933, and the next year formed a partnership with his Uncle Wilbur in the building firm Beck & Beck. Soon after, Harry E. Pople, a banker, was brought in, and with his experience in land development and his ability to arrange mortgages for buyers, Beck, Pople & Beck were ready for an ambitious project. By 1937, the firm had brought in old-time architect H. C. Clepper to be the official named architect for Swan Acres. But these striking houses were young Quentin Beck’s designs.1
Not long ago, a tour group from the Art Deco Society of New York visited Swan Acres by special invitation of two of the residents, a pair of artists who live in the best-preserved house in the plan. And by special invitation of the Art Deco Society, old Pa Pitt came along for the tour, having been their guide to the Allegheny County Airport earlier the same morning. By special permission of the owners, then, we can show our readers some of one of these extraordinary International Style houses.
As we enter, we find ourselves in a center hall with a stairway partly illuminated by glass-block windows that bring in light from the living room.
Here we see why the living room has light to spare. The original steel casement windows have been closely duplicated with modern windows in the same size and shape—except that, as we see in the drawing above, the panes to the right were originally glass block.
Corner windows were, as Father Pitt has often remarked, a badge of modernism in the 1930s, and they had some practical advantages. For example…
In the kitchen, the corner windows bring in light from two directions while still leaving much more space for wall-mounted cabinets than in a traditional kitchen this size.
When we come up the stairs, we are in a brightly lit hallway.
The bedrooms also have corner windows, of course, and outdoor terraces for the bedrooms are also a common feature of many modernistic houses like this.
In this house, the bathrooms have kept some of their original fixtures.
This view of the back of the house shows us the blunted corners and corner windows, along with an outdoor patio with bedroom terrace above.
The house originally had an integral garage, which has been converted into another room (with matching windows).
Only four houses designed by Beck were built at Swan Acres. The Becks got tired of Harry Pople and left the firm in 1937. Two more substantial modernist houses were built—one designed by New York architect Harrie T. Lindeberg, and one by Pittsburgher Joseph W. Hoover. In addition, a few modest cube-shaped houses with unimaginative modernistic details were built before World War II, and these were probably the work of H. C. Clepper.
Only three of the original Swan Acres houses have survived in anything like their original condition. Most owners lost patience with the flat roofs and solved their leaking problems with peaked roofs, and various other alterations typical of suburban Pittsburgh have been made. After the war, the empty lots filled in with prosaic ranch houses, split-levels, and Colonials; the “modern only” rule had been repealed, or reinterpreted to allow practically anything.
As for young Quentin Beck, he went on to a career after the war designing many of those prosaic ranch houses and split-levels that line our winding suburban streets. He also designed a few substantial apartment buildings in a modernist style, though they do not seem to old Pa Pitt to be outstanding of their type. The postwar boom demanded a get-it-done attitude from an architect who expected to make a living, and the artistic side was beaten out of Quentin Beck. In the 1960s, he spent much of his public life promoting a visionary pneumatic-tube transit system that would whisk Pittsburghers to San Francisco in five hours.
Beck’s last major project was the Lebanon House apartment high-rise at the northern end of Uptown Mount Lebanon. It was still under construction in 1967 when Beck walked into his garage, closed the door, and turned on his car engine.
Most of our information about the genesis and short life of Beck, Pople & Beck comes from “Swan Acres, ‘the nation’s first Modern subdivision,’ Revisited and Reassessed,” by Albert M. Tannler, in the PHLF News for April, 2011. The research into Quentin Beck’s later life and career was shared with us by David Schwing. ↩︎
Jacksonia Street is lined with small rowhouses and other domestic constructions of the middle to late 1800s. These houses speak for themselves, so old Pa Pitt will just get out of the way and let you look at the pictures.
A row of houses designed by Frederick Osterling, who lived just down the street. The Flemish style is striking. Some years ago they were restored and turned into condominium apartments as the Osterling Flats.
Old Pa Pitt does not mean that title entirely facetiously. Artificial sidings are a big part of Pittsburgh’s identity. Many neighborhoods are almost defined by the long rows of frame houses clad in aluminum and vinyl. But few neighborhoods can show us such a concentrated collection of every kind of fake siding from every era as Spring Garden. Often we see almost all of them on the same house. The house above, for example, has aluminum on the front, but around the side we see an older layer of grey Insulbrick, some asphalt shingles on the dormer, some multicolored asphalt or asbestos-cement shingles in the gable, along with large rectangles of something that caused Father Pitt to throw up his hands and give up his attempts to identify it. We can see that the siding was done in layers; the multicolored shingles were covered over with the big rectangles of whatever, which in turn were covered with Insulbrick, and then the aluminum came last. Each of these was probably peddled as a lifetime solution, but the house has outlived all of them.
The house sits on a street of similarly altered houses, each one mutilated in its own way. Yet the combined effect is a cheerful and welcoming streetscape. These are houses that have been loved, decade after decade.
Here is another house with a variety of sidings. On the side we see asbestos-cement diamonds—once very common, but now becoming rarer and rarer, except in Spring Garden. If you have a house with asbestos-cement siding like this, don’t spend much time worrying about it. Even the companies that make their money from asbestos remediation will tell you that, if the siding is stable, it is safe, and you should leave it in place.
That same house has some sort of vinyl or plastic tiles on the front with a fake wood-grain pattern.
This little house is condemned, which is unfortunate. The siding wasn’t that bad. Behind a brick porch, the house is sheathed in aluminum, which of course does not rust, but is commonly stained with rust from the fasteners and other steel parts used to install it.
Barely visible behind the lush growth of jungle, this house is covered in multicolored asbestos-cement hexagons. There was a time when that seemed like a good idea, and many relics of that time are preserved in Spring Garden.
Here is another house of many sidings—aluminum on the front, asbestos-cement hexagons and Insulbrick on the side.
Even the Lutheran church (of which we’ll see more soon) is a frame building covered with fake stone.
Often siding marks where a neighboring building has disappeared. Here we see an odd phenomenon: a wood-sided house that was covered with aluminum, but then lost an attached neighbor, whereupon the scar was covered with vertical wood planking. Behind it is a house with two different kinds of aluminum siding and what appears to be vertical vinyl siding covering an old storefront.
Father Pitt likes to make fun of the many varieties of artificial siding in Pittsburgh, although his fun is mixed with a certain amount of awe. He even has a name for the most common ones: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Aluminum, Vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone). But if you live in one of these houses, do not suppose that old Pa Pitt is mocking you. If you are keeping the house standing, you are doing a good thing. If you love your home, give it all the attention it deserves. And maybe some happy day, when your ship comes in, you can afford to restore the house to the way it would have looked when it had wood siding and big, bright windows.
Doubtless we’ll be seeing more of Spring Garden’s historic bad siding, because one article can only scratch the surface. But we hope our readers have enjoyed a trip to one of Pittsburgh’s many odd little corners.
Spring Garden is a very old neighborhood, with some houses that go back to its roots as a valley farming community. This house, with its generous balcony and huge Italianate windows, caught old Pa Pitt’s eye, and by good luck the owners happened to be coming home and started a neighborly conversation. According to them, the house began as a barn in the 1860s; the foundation and some undetermined part of the barn are built into the house as it stands.
The lush plantings of begonias and impatiens were just about at their peak when Father Pitt took these pictures.
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.
