Father Pitt

Tag: Houses

  • Billy Buck Hill

    South 18th Street, which used to be the Brownsville Plank Road before it was taken into the city of Pittsburgh, snakes up through the South Side Slopes, following an ancient track that probably predates European settlement. It makes a long loop around a lumpy eminence known locally as Billy Buck Hill, where typical tall and narrow Slopes houses crowd on absurdly precipitous lots. These houses in the foreground are lined up along St. Paul Street. In the background, across the Mon, we see Oakland, which is as usual full of cranes.

    The usual story of the etymology of Billy Buck Hill has to do with goats having been kept there, and that seems plausible. But old Pa Pitt is not willing to swear to it, because it has the look of one of those ex-post-facto etymologies suggested speculatively as the probable reason for the name, and then picked up as the only possible explanation and presented as fact.

  • Macbeth House, Shadyside

    Built in the 1880s, this fine Queen Anne house shows up in 1890 as belonging to Mrs. Geo. A. Macbeth. The variety of masses and textures is handled with remarkably good taste.

  • Two Varieties of Tudor in Shadyside

    Tudor house

    Two varieties of Tudor house. They have very similar center-hall plans, but the one above emphasizes extravagant and almost cartoonish woodwork, whereas the one below is much more restrained. Old Pa Pitt would have guessed that the second one was later, but the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site tells us that both were built at about the same time, not long before 1910 (between the “1903–1906” layer and the “1910” layer). It would be interesting to know the name of the somewhat eccentric architect who designed the one above.

    Another Tudor house

  • Condemned House in Sharpsburg

    Condemned house in Sharpsburg

    This house is under sentence of condemnation. There is nothing really special about it, except that it is probably about 150 years old and a good representative of the Gothic I-house. The I-house is a vernacular style of house common in Pennsylvania and much of the Midwest, with a center hall and two rooms on either side. When the simple plan is complicated by a peaked central gable, as in this house, it is it is described as a Gothic I-house. Often the I-house is extended by additions that give it an L shape—and sometimes more than one addition accumulates over the years, as we see with this one, where the smaller addition in the foreground was probably added around the 1920s, to judge by the 3-over-1 window on the second floor.

    From the side

    Note the pointed vernacular-Gothic windows in the attic.

  • Tudor House on Pembroke Place, Shadyside

    House on Pembroke Place

    A big house or small mansion in a particularly lush Tudor style. The woodwork is decorated with unusual care.

    Woodwork

  • Spencer House, Shadyside

    Spencer House

    This house on Amberson Avenue at Pembroke Place was built in the 1880s; it appears on the map in 1890 as belonging to Mrs. C. H. Spencer. The “stick style” is fairly unusual in Pittsburgh, but this is a magnificent example.

    A different angle

  • Knable House, Shadyside

    Knable house

    A tasteful Jacobean house built in 1911, as we know from the date stone over the front door. It seems to have been built for a John E. Knable.

    Addendum: The architect was W. F. Struthers, who had formerly been partner with Thomas Hannah.

    1911

    Architectural historians sometimes use the term “Jacobethan” for a style that is indeterminately Tudor and Jacobean mashed together.

    Knable house, oblique view

  • Georgian Mansion in Shadyside

    720 Amberson Avenue

    A large house that probably dates from the 1920s, with a recent expansion in the rear; it was getting all new windows when old Pa Pitt took these pictures.

    With trees
    Main entrance
    Lintel
    Oblique view

    A “virtual tour” from a year ago, when the house sold for a little less than two million, shows a computer simulation of a thoroughly modernized interior.

  • Stair-Step Rowhouses in Oakland

    Rowhouses on Louisa Street

    Pittsburgh is full of these little two-storey rowhouses from the first half of the twentieth century. They are often more spacious than they appear, because they are much deeper than you might guess. Like every other kind of building, they have to adapt to Pittsburgh topography, so that, on a sloping street like Louisa Street in Oakland, they end up stair-stepped like this.

  • Central Oakland in the Rain

    Coltart Avenue

    Rows of houses and small apartment buildings in the shadow of the Oakland medical-intellectual district.