Father Pitt

Tag: Houses

  • Terrace by Janssen & Abbott on McKee Place, Oakland

    368–378 McKee Place

    This striking design was by Janssen & Abbott, and it shows Benno Janssen developing that economy of line old Pa Pitt associates with his best work, in which there are exactly the right number of details to create the effect he wants and no more. The row was built in about 1913.1 The resemblance to another row on King Avenue in Highland Park is so strong that old Pa Pitt attributes that row to Janssen & Abbott as well.

    Terrace on King Avenue, Highland Park
    The terrace on King Avenue, Highland Park. In some secondary sources, this one is misattributed to Frederick Scheibler, but Scheibler’s biographer Martin Aurand found no evidence linking him to this terrace.
    Row of houses by Janssen & Abbott

    These houses are not quite as well kept as the ones in Highland Park. They have been turned into duplexes and seem to have fallen under separate ownership, resulting in—among other alterations—the tiniest aluminum awnings old Pa Pitt has ever seen up there on the attic dormers of two of the houses.

    Two of the houses

    Nevertheless, the design still overwhelms the miscellaneous alterations and makes this one of the most interesting terraces in Oakland.

    Brick gatepost with number 378 and a half
    Two end houses
    Terrace
    Perspective view down the row
    Terrace on McKee Place
    Perspective view from the other direction
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Narrow Rowhouses in Lawrenceville

    300 block of 46th Street

    The houses in this row at the upper end of 46th Street were all built on the same plan. They were put up in two stages around the turn of the twentieth century, though they are not much different from Pittsburgh rowhouses of a hundred years earlier. The rising value of Lawrenceville real estate has caused an epidemic of third-floor expansions recently; Father Pitt will admit to thinking they are ugly, but by matching the square footage to the value of the location they keep the main structure of the house in good shape. Below we see one house with its original dormer (and classic aluminum awning) and one house with a new third floor (and apologetic little contemporary awningette).

    335 and 337 46th Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Rowhouses at Fifth Avenue and Robinson Street, Oakland

    Rowhouses at Fifth and Robinson

    Sitting at the eastern end of the Great Soho Curve, these houses face eastward, so that they are right in front of you as you travel west on Fifth Avenue. Father Pitt was very sad some years ago when one of the row burned, leaving an irreparable gap; but the rest of the houses, after some years of neglect, are in good shape.

    Rowhouses at Fifth and Robinson
    Staggered rowhouses
    Two houses
    Pair of houses
    Chimney pots
    Dormer
    Front door
    Transom
    Breezeway

    The houses have breezeways between them, which we could not leave undocumented.

    Breezeway
    Breezeway
    Rowhouses
    Rowhouses
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • The Rainbow Terrace on Dawson Street, Oakland

    Colorfully painted rowhouses

    Within their low-budget limits, these little houses are of an attractive design, and they are very well kept up. The odd-shaped lot also means that they are staggered in a visually interesting way. But, still, they would be just seven among thousands of Pittsburgh rowhouses if they had not been painted in this striking way that lights up the whole block.

    Rainbow houses
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Addendum: The architect was probably Frederick Sauer, who seems to have done all the architectural work for John Dimling, the developer who owned this row. See also the Harry, George, Matilda, Laura, Hilda, and Herbert apartments.

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  • Condemned Houses on Bedford Avenue, Hill District

    Condemned Second Empire houses

    Some day these houses will disappear. They are typical of middle-class houses that sprouted on the Hill in the 1890s, making use of the Second Empire mansard roof to give these narrow houses two more bedrooms on the third floors. Generations of condemnation notices have been pasted on them. They would be worth restoring if they were moved to another neighborhood, and perhaps they have some hope here, now that the Hill is growing new construction and looking more hopeful. But it isn’t likely that they’ll win their race with the wrecking ball.

    Two of the houses
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • House by Max Nirdlinger, Perry Hilltop

    137 Marshall Avenue

    Maximilian Nirdlinger, who rests near the top of Father Pitt’s list of architects whose names are most fun to say, designed this striking house, which is unique in a row that otherwise consists mostly of Pittsburgh Foursquares. Nirdlinger was one of the giants of the first half of the twentieth century in Pittsburgh. He was a pupil of the Philadelphia titan Frank Furness, but left the master to come to Pittsburgh in 1899. By the early 1900s, he had his own practice.1 He quickly caught the eye of the fashionable set: four of the original houses in Schenley Farms, for example, were designed by Nirdlinger.

    137 Marshall Avenue

    Nirdlinger worked in many different styles: he could give you a Renaissance palace or a Tudor mansion with equal flair. For this Art Nouveau cottage, designed in 1916 for C. R. Caldwell, he seems to have taken a lot of hints from those German art magazines that circulated among our architects before the First World War.

    Porch and front door
    137 Marshall Avenue
    Olympus E-20N.
    1. Much of our information on Nirdlinger comes from “Maximilian Nirdlinger:
      Architect, Interrupted,” by Angelique Bamberger, in Western Pennsylvania History, Winter 2023-24. ↩︎
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  • Two Houses on Brighton Road, Allegheny West

    913 Brighton Road

    These two houses facing West Park on what used to be Irwin Avenue both have interestingly complex histories. The one above has a detailed history by the late Carol Peterson, so here we will only mention the things that led to its appearance today and encourage you to see the Peterson history for more details. It was built in about 1870 as an Italianate house. In 1890 Augusta and Jacob Kaufmann of the Kaufmann Brothers department store bought the house. It was given a third floor, and the whole house was made over in the Romanesque style with Queen Anne overtones.

    Front door
    907 Brighton Road

    The house next door was probably built at about the same time as its neighbor. Without the help of Carol Peterson, we can only report what we observe. It was also built in the Italianate style, and it looks as though the third floor is an addition here as well. But the addition may have been made earlier than the alterations to its neighbor, since the tall windows were done in the same Italianate style as the ones below the third floor. The round bay in front was finished off with a mansard roof, showing the influence of the Second Empire style that was popular here before Romanesque became the big fad.

    907 Brighton Road
    Window
    Lintel
    907 Brighton Road
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.
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  • Some Houses on Stanton Avenue, Highland Park

    5521 Stanton Avenue

    Four houses on Stanton Avenue, which is the line that separates Highland Park from East Liberty. First, two that obviously go together, though they differ in a few details.

    Upstairs window
    5521
    5523
    Upstairs Window
    5515 Stanton Avenue

    Here is a house we might describe as center-hall-Colonial-Baroque.

    Dormer

    The Baroque details of the central dormer need a bit of restoration. We hope they can be repaired rather than simply replaced with simpler wood (or aluminum or vinyl).

    5515 Stanton Avenue

    Finally, a house that is more than twenty years younger than its neighbors; the lot was still vacant in 1923, according to plat maps.

    5527
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Tudor Manse by Henry Gilchrist in Highland Park

    5916 Callowhill Street

    Henry Gilchrist designed many fashionable mansions for the rich and the upper middle classes. This 1904 Tudor house on Callowhill Street is typical of the “English style” of the time, but the details of the half-timbering are unusually rich. The house is very similar, but not identical, to one Gilchrist designed two years later in Schenley Farms. In this house, though, the small-paned Tudor windows have been preserved, and they add to the picturesque old-English effect.1

    5916 Callowhill Street
    HDR picture of 5916 Callowhill Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    This HDR picture of the house, made up of three different exposures, looks a bit artificial but brings out the details in the woodwork.

    1. Source for the attribution: Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, August 31, 1904, p. 563. “Mr. E. E. Arensburg will erect a dwelling on Callowhill street, from plans prepared by Architect H. D. Gilchrist, Frick Building.” Confirmed by a 1923 plat map, where the house belongs to “M. Arnesburg” (note spelling). ↩︎
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  • R. P. McAllister House, Highland Park

    R. P. McAllister House

    Paul Irwin designed this house for R. P. McAllister; it was built in about 1920. (Father Pitt knows this information because the owners of the house helpfully inscribed it on a bronze plaque around the corner at the delivery entrance.) Though it is eclectic in its influences, everything works in harmony, from the Georgian front door to the Japanese eyebrow in the roofline to the surprising outbreaks of half-timbering in the rear.

    1401 North Highland Avenue
    Perspective view
    From Down the Street
    Rear of the house
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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