This fashionably Romanesque house was probably built in the 1890s for a W. Snively. It has been converted to apartments, but the original outlines of the house are still evident. If, by the way, you are embarrassed by the soot stains on the stone of your house, old Pa Pitt suggests overcoming your embarrassment and embracing the history that soot represents. The alternative of painting your stone grey is not a success.
Perrysville Avenue started as a plank road, with tollgates, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it began to fill up as the spine of a pleasant suburban neighborhood of Allegheny. Today Perry Hilltop is a strange mixture of appalling decay and beautiful restoration: it has never quite got off the ground as a trendy neighborhood, but some of the houses have been beautifully preserved. The splendid Dutch Colonial mansion above, for example, is in very good shape. Note the original windows. It was probably built around the turn of the twentieth century.
A Victorian frame house that preserves some of its original details, including the trim around the windows. It appears on an 1882 plat map, so it probably dates from the 1870s.
This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.
This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.
This short block in the North Charles Street Valley has suffered some attrition of houses, but the remaining houses have been restored beautifully and give us a good idea of how the street looked. They were built in about 1887. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation attributes the design to William A. Stone, who would be governor of Pennsylvania ten years later; but Father Pitt suspects Stone may have been the developer rather than the architect.
The houses on the northwest side of the street are tiny but create an impression of prosperity.
The houses on the southeast side of the street are slightly less tiny; they are a little wider, and their mansard roofs give them a full third floor.
This photograph appeared in the fifth exhibition of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club in 1910 (and was reproduced in the catalogue). The house must have seemed quite modern and up to date; it would not have seemed old-fashioned thirty years later. Old Pa Pitt has not studied Mr. Phillips’ career yet, but he was obviously successful enough to build a fine house for himself in a fashionable part of town.
It is cheering to report that the house is still in excellent condition today. A front porch has been added, but with good taste, so that we would hardly guess it had not been part of the original composition.
North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.
We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.
A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.
A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.
Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.
An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.
A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.
A small apartment building.
A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.
Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.
This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.
Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.1 The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.
Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.
For his entire career, Louis A. S. Bellinger was the only Black registered architect in western Pennsylvania. His most famous work today is the Pythian Temple, later the New Granada Theater, on the Hill. This is a much smaller project—a six-room house built in 1929 for a middle-class client.1 But the client got his money’s worth. It’s not a work of towering genius: it’s just the best house you could get for the money, designed by a man who knew how to take the ordinary Pittsburgh house and make it a little bit special.
The house is abandoned and overgrown, and it will probably not last much longer. It would take a miracle to save it—a miracle that made the location suddenly valuable, since it will require a nearly complete gutting to put the house back in livable shape. All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists now, so that future historians will know that Louis Bellinger made it.
It appears that the house originally had an open porch with an arched entrance; later most of the porch was closed in to make another room. The large window opening in front was a good bit larger when it was an open porch, as we can tell by the slight difference in mortar in the bricks to either side of the window.
Two rows of houses that have adapted to the trendy business atmosphere of South Craig Street. The row above has been adapted with minimal external modifications.
Since old Pa Pitt is a connoisseur of breezeways, he could not neglect this exceptionally fine example.
This row has been altered a bit more, though some care was taken to preserve its distinctive outlines.
Cola Street was originally called Coal Street, but at some point there was a transposition of letters. It clings to the edge of Mount Washington, and it was originally built up with the cheapest grade of frame houses. Some of those houses have been adapted to expensive eyries for Pittsburghers who want the most dramatic view of the city; they have been joined by newer houses also specialized for sucking in as much view as possible. Below, a local architect’s own home, perhaps his childhood dream house that he finally prospered enough to build for himself.
