Tag: Houses

  • St. James Street, Shadyside

    617 St. James Street

    We should have put a utility-cable trigger warning at the top of this article, but too late now. The block of St. James Street between Ellsworth Avenue and Pembroke Place is lined with fine houses in an interesting variety of styles, and here are some of them.

    617 St. James Street
    709 St. James Street
    711 St. James Street
    711 St. James Street
    713 St. James Street
    726 St. James Street
    716 St. James Street
    712 St. James Street
    712 St. James Street
    700 St. James Street
    Chimney pots

    It is well known that old Pa Pitt loves good chimney pots, and these are just right for this house.

    616 St. James Street
    Dormer
  • Lebanon Hills in the Rain

    40 Lebanon Hills Drive

    Last week we saw Mission Hills in the snow. The next plan down the way, Lebanon Hills, was laid out shortly after Mission Hills, and we see it here in the weather nature granted us when we happened to be there. The parts closer to Washington Road have, like Mission Hills, an extraordinarily broad assortment of housing styles; the parts farther east are mostly postwar construction. Here is a large album of some of the more interesting houses.

    55 Connecting Road
    81 Lebanon Hills Drive

    In order to avoid weighing down the front page, we’ll put the rest of these pictures below the fold, to use a metaphor derived from “newspapers,” an extinct form of communication some of Father Pitt’s older readers may remember.

    (more…)
  • St. James Terrace, Shadyside

    St. James Terrace plaque

    The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historic marker at the entrance tells us all Father Pitt knows about St. James Terrace: that it was built in 1915, and that the builder was John E. Born. Perhaps we will discover the architect one of these days.

    St. James Terrace is an enclave within an enclave: it branches off the narrow dead-end St. James Place, but with no access for vehicles. Instead, the houses are arranged around a narrow but beautiful garden court, which looks very romantic in the snow.

    St. James Terrace
    St. James Terrace
    Houses on the north side
    Bare tree branch
    St. James Terrace
  • Some Houses on Glenmore Avenue, Dormont

    2850 Glenmore Avenue

    Several of these houses have fallen into the hands of house-flippers, which means that they have been made presentable with cheap materials that disguise the architects’ original intentions. But we can be grateful that they were rescued by capitalism from otherwise certain decay and demolition.

    We begin with a design that, from certain angles, looks almost like a stretched bungalow. The part that is covered with vinyl siding was probably wood-shingled, although it went through a half-timber-and-stucco period that might also have been the original plan.

    stone arch
    Front and steps
    Bungalow

    Here is a tidy little bungalow with no stretching at all, and it seems to retain almost all its original Arts-and-Crafts style.

    2856 Glenmore Avenue

    Nothing says “flipped house” like vinyl siding and snap-on shutters for the windows. But the twin gables with swooping extended roofline show us the romantic fairy-tale cottage the architect meant this house to be. The top half, again, was probably wood-shingled; more recently it was covered with asbestos-cement shingles.

    2856 again
    Perspective view
    Prairie-style house in Dormont

    This unusual house brings more than a hint of the Prairie Style to the back streets of Dormont. Plastic cartoon shutters again, but those could be removed by the next enlightened owner, leaving an exterior almost completely original. The patterned brickwork is eye-catching without being garish.

    2840 Glenmore Avenue

    The sunroom protruding from the front was probably an open porch when the house was built.

    More pictures of Glenmore Avenue.

  • Mission Hills in the Snow

    Parkway Drive

    Mission Hills in Mount Lebanon was laid out in 1921 as an ideally picturesque automobile suburb. The lots were sold off individually, so that each buyer hired his own architect and builder. The result is a delightful variety of styles that all fit comfortably together. We’ll take a look at a couple of those houses individually later, but right now here is a big album of Mission Hills houses in the snow.

    343 Parkway Drive

    To keep from weighing down the front page, we’ll put the rest of the pictures behind a “read more” link.

    (more…)
  • Colonial Place

    Mansion at Colonial Place

    Colonial Place is one of those tiny enclaves all built at once in which Shadyside abounds. This one was built in 1898, and it is unique in that the entrance is flanked by two grand mansions.

    Mansion

    George S. Orth was the architect of almost all the houses in Colonial Place. (See if you can guess which house old Pa Pitt thinks was not part of the original plan.) Mr. Orth had a prosperous career designing mansions for the wealthy, as well as some large institutions like the School for Blind Children. But he seems to have been forgotten faster than most Pittsburgh architects. He died in 1918; ten years later, when the architect George Schwan died at 55, his obituary in the Charette had to remind readers who Orth was: “He [Schwan] was trained in the office of George S. Orth, old time architect of Pittsburgh…” That is all the more remarkable because the Charette was the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, of all groups the one that would be most likely to remember George S. Orth.

    At any rate, Colonial Place is still a remarkably pleasant little street. The landscaping was done by E. H. Bachman, and the sycamores he planted still shade the street in summer and make a striking avenue in the winter with their stark white branches and trunks.

    Colonial Place
    House
    House, front view
    House, perspective view
    Ranch house
    House with green shingles
    House with white shingles
    House with maroon shingles
    House
    House
    Mansion

    This mansion is currently the residence of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Pittsburgh.

    Terra cotta
    Mansion

    This one is currently for sale, and you can tour the interior on Google Street View (push the “Browse Street View images” standing-figure button to reveal little blue dots all over the house).

    Side entrance
    Ionic capital
    Bracket
  • Italianate Houses in Allegheny West

    Italianate houses on North Lincoln Avenue

    This pair of houses is obscured by trees all through the leafy months, but in the winter we can appreciate the simple but tasteful Italianate details.

    The difference in bricks suggests that the third floor was added later, but still early enough that the Italianate details were matched exactly.

  • Joseph & Elizabeth Horne House, Allegheny West

    Joseph O. Horne house

    An early work of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow in Pittsburgh, this house was given the Carol J. Peterson treatment, so that it has its own little book of its history. Old Pa Pitt will not repeat everything the late Ms. Peterson found out about it, but this is the outline: Joseph O. Horne, son of the department-store baron, married Elizabeth Jones, daughter of the steel baron B. F. Jones, and her father had Longfellow, Alden & Harlow design this cozy little Romanesque house for the young couple. It was one of the many houses restored in the late twentieth century by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, and now it looks pretty much the way the architects drew it, minus some erosion and a century of soot.

    Dormer decoration

    The decoration on the dormer is a bit eroded, but that probably makes it more picturesque than it was when the house was new.

    Joseph O. Horne House
  • One Side of One Block of Espy Avenue, Dormont

    House on Espy Avenue

    Many well-known architects worked in Dormont, as old Pa Pitt knows from leafing through the construction trade journals of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, those journals are usually maddeningly vague on locations, so it has been hard to identify which house was designed by which architect. But we can appreciate the art even without knowing the name of the artist.

    Espy Avenue is a street of particularly fine houses, and the finest block is the one between Potomac Avenue and Lasalle Avenue. Here are a few houses from the northwest side of the street, because the sun happened to be shining on that side when Father Pitt was out walking in Dormont.

    House on Espy Avenue
    House on Espy Avenue
    House on Espy Avenue
    House on Espy Avenue
    House on Espy Avenue
    House on Espy Avenue
    House
    House
    House
    This is a house as well
    Oh, look, it’s a house

    Father Pitt will have to come back to Dormont soon when the other side of the street is properly illuminated. But he could not resist taking pictures of this one double house, even with the sun behind it, because it is an exceptional design exceptionally well preserved:

    Duplex in Dormont
    The same duplex from the front

    A few bits of wood have been replaced with aluminum, and the brick walls in front of the porch may not be original, but otherwise this grand duplex is probably much as the architect imagined it.

    All these pictures were taken to test a Sony camera Father Pitt found in a thrift store for about six dollars. It has a Zeiss lens that seems to live up to its reputation. The resolution is 4 megapixels, but our experiments here at Pa Pitt Labs show that a 4-megapixel picture doubled to 16 megapixels from a camera with a good lens looks better than a 16-megapixel picture from a camera with an indifferent lens.

  • Row of Houses by Carpenter & Crocker, Homewood

    This picture was taken a year and a half ago, but it seems it got lost in the press of events, and Father Pitt never published it here. He went looking for it because he had just found the architects: research by the grandson of William Carpenter indicates that these houses on Kelly Street at Collier Street were designed by Carpenter & Crocker in about 1901. They were originally part of a larger group of 24 dwellings, but two other rows—one on Collier Street, the cross street, and one on the alley behind, Fleury Way—have vanished. The building on the corner was probably part of the original row; at any rate, it was in place by 1910, when a fire-insurance map shows a three-storey building here at the end of a row of two-storey buildings. It looks to old Pa Pitt like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense: that is, a bar with rooms above to make it eligible for a “hotel” liquor license.

    Two years later, Carpenter & Crocker would design St. James Episcopal Church, now the Church of the Holy Cross, just across Collier Street from these houses. Was the developer a member of the St. James congregation?