Pittsburgh has many Millionaires’ Rows, and one of them is along Aylesboro Avenue in Squirrel Hill. This house is typical of the rectangular Renaissance-palace style that was popular for large houses in the early 1900s.
-
Renaissance Palace in Squirrel Hill
-
Civil-War-Era Frame Houses on Jane Street
Each one of them has had its individual adventures, but it seems fairly certain that this row of half a dozen frame houses with narrow dormers dates from before 1872. Together they form something of a manual or catalogue of things that can happen to a frame house in Pittsburgh over the course of a century and a half.
-
Queen Anne House in Carnegie
This splendid house sits on the hill overlooking the part of Carnegie that was formerly the borough of Chartiers.
-
Doolittle House, Carnegie
A splendid country house overlooking the town of Chartiers (now the western half of Carnegie). Several real-estate sites on line list this house as built in 1900 or 1901, but clearly it is decades older, and very well preserved. According to our old maps, it appears to be the Doolittle house (but old Pa Pitt would be happy to be corrected). This section of Carnegie northwest of the railroad, the “Doolittle Place Plan,” was built on the former Jacob Doolittle estate, and Doolittle Avenue runs along the northeast side of the house.
-
House on Charles Street, Knoxville
Knoxville was a fairly rich neighborhood at one time, especially in the area around the old Knox mansion (where the abandoned Knoxville Junior High School is now). This is a good sample of some of the fine houses that still stand in the neighborhood; it needs some work, but it is in good shape overall, and it has not lost most of its distinctive character.
-
Houses on the South Side Slopes
Improbable houses on the Slopes, with a view of Oakland in the background.
-
Hillside House in Schenley Farms, Cleaned
This house in Schenley Farms has had a thorough cleaning and looks just built. It has also lost a large and perhaps obstructive tree. Compare the picture above to the one below, which Father Pitt took in 2014:
Addendum: This house, known as “Ledge House,” was designed by Henry Hornbostel. It was the home of Arthur Hamerschlag, for whom Hamerschlag Hall was named.
-
Victorian House on South 18th Street
This is the kind of eclectic mess twentieth-century architects meant when they vigorously condemned everything “Victorian.” You can hardly pin it down to any historical style. That would probably identify it as “Queen Anne,” the term for Victorian domestic architecture that is a hodgepodge of every historical style, with strange angles thrown in for added picturesque effect. And to those twentieth-century architects, old Pa Pitt has only this to say: this house is a lot more attractive and a lot more pleasant to live in than anything you came up with.
-
Observatory Hill in 2000
Three pictures taken with a Russian Lubitel twin-lens-reflex camera in January of 2000. Very little has changed in 21 years. Above, the Byzantine Catholic Seminary, a building that is a strange mix of modernist and classical elements with an onion dome.
The Byzantine metropolitan’s residence. In the Latin Rite, Pittsburgh is not even an archdiocese, but in the Byzantine Rite, Pittsburgh is the seat of an archeparchy covering eleven states.
A typical Observatory Hill house on Riverview Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s most attractive streets.
-
Martin’s Cabin
Martin’s Cabin is a log house of the 1700s preserved in Schenley Park. There are not very many buildings of that era left within city limits: the Fort Pitt Blockhouse, the Neill Log House, this cabin, and possibly the Old Stone Tavern are the only ones Father Pitt knows of. It is a curious fact that all the grand houses of stone and brick in old Pittsburgh have long since disappeared, but this humble poor man’s cabin remains. (UPDATE: Note the kind comment below reminding us of the John Woods House in Hazelwood, which is in fact a stone house, though not one of the grandest of its time.)
Camera: Canon PowerShot S45.
