Virginia Manor is where the rich rich people live in Mount Lebanon. It’s full of houses designed by some of the most distinguished Pittsburgh architects of the 1920s and 1930s. Osage Road has some of the grandest houses, so here is your look at how the other half lives—unless you are the other half, in which case here is your hand mirror.
Originally this house on Tennyson Avenue was a Renaissance palace with a little whiff of Prairie Style. It was built in 1910 for Martin G. Bauer, Jr. The architect, Maximilian Nirdlinger, drew it in the common shape of the Pittsburgh Renaissance palace, with exaggerated brackets that look westward to Chicago but also recall the Italianate houses of a generation earlier.
At some point, the owners decided what they really wanted was a Southern plantation mansion. They amputated the porch and left a house-wide scar filled in with stucco that only draws attention to it, and then added a two-storey round portico, spending a lot of money to leave the house looking socked in the face.
We can imagine what the house looked like with the porch intact. But we don’t have to work very hard at it, because across the street is a very similar house, built one year earlier and designed by the same architect:
Here we see how the houses were both intended to look. The front porch emphasizes the breadth of the house, making it look long and low in spite of its three floors.
Now we can turn back to the Bauer house and see what it was trying to be. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, it is always best to stick to the original style of a house in making additions or alterations. Any attempt to make the house into something it is not draws attention to the fact that it is not that thing.
Longuevue Drive is one of the streets in Beverly Heights, one of the plans from the 1920s that make the Mount Lebanon Historic District a museum of interwar domestic architecture. The variety of styles is delightful. One gets the impression that all the rules have been repealed, and you can have whatever house your most childish fantasy specifies, from a French château to a fairy-tale witch’s cottage.
We have dozens of pictures if you choose to see them, but because there are so many, we put them behind a “more” link.
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One of the most remarkable things about the houses in the Mount Lebanon Historic District is how little they change. Many of them are preserved almost exactly as they were built—like this one, built in 1934 from a design by Hannah & Sterling. Hannah is Thomas Hannah, an architect at the end of a long and prosperous career when this house was built; Sterling was the younger P. Howard Sterling, who would continue designing houses in Mount Lebanon after his older partner died. The picture above shows the house as it appears today, and the fuzzy microfilm picture (it’s the lower of these two pictures) from the Pittsburgh Press right after the house was built matches it almost exactly.
William D. Hamilton was in the coffin business, which he inherited from his father and built up into the National Casket Company, a titan in the death industry. North Avenue is the neighborhood line on city planning maps, so this house is in the Central Northside neighborhood by those standards; but socially it belongs to Allegheny West, and the Allegheny West site has a detailed history of 940 West North Avenue.
Father Pitt does not know the architect. The style is best described as “eclectic,” but the Gothic windows upstairs give the house a slightly somber and funereal aspect. Since those two trees have been flourishing in front, it is impossible to get a view of the whole façade except in the winter.
Most of the houses in Schenley Farms were built singly: usually the property owner chose an architect, though the land company built a few houses to sell on spec. But on Schenley Farms Terrace, Janssen & Abbott were hired to design a row of seventeen houses all at once. The result is one of those rare tract-house developments where the houses are little masterpieces that combine to make a beautiful and well-thought-out streetscape.
(The house at extreme left with the colonnaded balcony is not part of the Janssen & Abbott row.)
Similar developments stick to one style, but on Schenley Farms Terrace you come across a Colonial Revival house, and then a crisply modern cottage, and then a Pittsburgh Foursquare, and then a French farmhouse. Somehow they all look comfortable together.
Again, similar developments stick to one scale, but Janssen uses differences in height to make a streetscape that feels as though it just grew there.
We have quite a large number of pictures here, so we put them behind a “more” link to avoid weighing down the front page.
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Mattern Avenue is a short street that illustrates what Father Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development. In population density, Dormont is number 119 out of tens of thousands of municipalities in the United States, and it is the most densely populated municipality in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area—denser than Pittsburgh.1 Yet the streets do not feel crowded. Mattern Avenue has a mixture of large houses designed by prestigious architects, smaller single-family houses, duplexes, and an apartment building, so that a fairly large number of people are housed in a small area, but without piling them up into concrete warehouses. Instead, we get a pleasantly varied streetscape and a quiet residential street that feels roomy.
The house above and below is by far the most original composition on the street. It seems as though the architect was told, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” So that was what the client got: a mad bungalow with some sort of growth disorder.
St. Clair Terrace is another housing plan laid out in the 1920s, with many of the houses built then or in the next decade. It’s included in the Mt. Lebanon Historic District. Here we have some houses on St. Clair Place.
Now a few of the houses on Roycroft Avenue, including some imaginative ones.
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Father Pitt continues documenting the domestic architecture of the Pittsburgh area, in the hope that some of his readers will begin to appreciate the character of the neighborhoods they live in.
Broadway in Dormont is the boulevard where the streetcars run in the median. That makes it a prominent street, and on one side some of the better-off citizens of the middle-class borough built houses on a lavishly upper-middle-class scale. The Tudor house above has had its porch enclosed, which disguises what would have been an interesting design with an overhanging second-floor sunroom.
This one has had vinyl siding applied with fairly good taste, but it would originally have been shingled above the ground floor.
Here we have arts-and-crafts style applied to the standard Pittsburgh Foursquare arrangement. The wood trim has been replaced with aluminum; there would probably have been prominent carved brackets to add to the arts-and-crafts appeal.
The archetypal Pittsburgh Foursquare.
When these houses were built, the big attraction of this street was its direct trolley link to downtown Pittsburgh.
That is still true today.
Navahoe Drive is just outside the Mount Lebanon Historic District, but it is lined with architecturally significant houses, mostly from the 1930s. It is a curious thing that there was something of a boom in homebuilding in the Depression years. Labor rates were low, so the conventional wisdom was that, if you could afford a home, you would get more for your money by building a new one than by buying an older one. Thus there were many empty houses owned by banks that had foreclosed on them and could not dispose of them, but also many new houses going up, sometimes in the same neighborhoods.
We have quite a few more houses beyond the “more” link.
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