Father Pitt

Tag: Houses

  • A Marble House in Brookline? Well, Almost…

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh

    The white facing blocks of this house set it apart from its neighbors, and from most other houses in Pittsburgh. Are they stone? Are they concrete? Well, mostly concrete, but a bit of both.

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh

    When the house was going up, it attracted some attention for its novel material. From the Gazette Times, December 20, 1914:

    MARBLE DUST WITH CEMENT.

    New Brookline House Discloses Novelty in Material Used.

    A house nearing completion in Brookline, attracting much attention, is the home being erected by Mrs. Mary M. Otterman, on Berkshire avenue, near Castlegate avenue. Its construction is hollow tile, veneered on the outside with white “marble” blocks. These blocks are made on the premises by the use of a molding machine, the material used being white cement and marble dust. While this method of construction is not expensive, it has a very beautiful effect. The white “marble” walls, with rich brown trim and colored roof, make it one of the most attractive homes in the South Hills. The property is being visited dally by architects, contractors and prospective builders and no doubt many “marble” veneer houses will be built around Pittsburgh in the early spring.

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh

    Well, it’s surprising how few of these “marble” houses we do see around Pittsburgh. It may be that architects and contractors missed out on a good idea. Here it is, 111 years later, and the “marble” blocks are still in perfect shape.

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh
    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh
    616 Berkshire Avenue
    Olympus E-20N.
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  • Row of Houses on Dawson Street, Oakland

    3821–3825 Dawson Street

    Frederick Sauer was probably the architect of these rather German-looking houses. They were built as rental properties on land that belonged to developer John Dimling, and in every case where we have found an architect listed for a Dimling project, it is always Frederick Sauer.

    3821–3825 Dawson Street

    It is a little hard to tell how the right end of the row looked originally. Alterations that look as though they were made in the 1970s have obscured the original design, which—with its curved corner—would have been something interesting.

    3821–3825 Dawson Street
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  • Modernistic Double House in Brookline

    5230 and 2528 Wedgemere Street

    “God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, and the details that would have refined the style of this double house have been lost: windows have been replaced, a hipped roof (invisible from this angle) replaced the original flat roof about six years ago, and we suspect that the porch railings and aluminum canopies are not original. Even so, we can see enough to see that this was an interestingly modern construction when it went up, probably in the late 1930s or the 1940s. The corner windows were a badge of modernity.

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  • Mr. Cooley Builds His Dream House

    C. D. Cooley house

    C. D. Cooley, an architect who was associated with the Bartberger brothers for a while in the firm of Bartberger, Cooley & Bartberger, built this home for himself in the newly accessible suburb of Brookline, which had suddenly become an easy commute from downtown Pittsburgh when the Transit Tunnel opened. It is a beautiful house even now, little altered from Mr. Cooley’s vision, and it stands out from its more pedestrian neighbors as a work of unusual taste.

    513 Bellaire Avenue

    But tragedy struck the Cooley family. In 1915, Mrs. Cooley died. She was only thirty years old.1 About half a year later, Mr. Cooley put the house up for sale.

    Advertisement for “Beautiful Residence in Brookline”
    Pittsburg Press, March 23, 1916.

    “Built by Pittsburg architect for home at cost of $9,000, but, owing to death in family will sacrifice to quick buyer.”

    We might add that the building cost of $9,000 might have been twice the cost of neighboring houses in Brookline. The house was not huge, but by Brookline standards it was luxurious, with expensive materials—stone instead of brick, and oak where neighboring houses would have had cheap yellow pine.

    Cooley house
    Porch
    Chimney Pots

    Father Pitt loves chimney pots, and these simple rectangular ones are perfectly matched to the style of the house.

    C. D. Cooley house
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • 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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