Father Pitt

Tag: Houses

  • Gothic Meets Modern on Acorn Hill

    3084 Marshall Road

    This stone mansion on Acorn Hill, with its eye-catching combination of Gothic and modernist details, was designed by William C. Young and built in 1937.

    “One Model Home Finished, Another Nears Completion,” Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50
    Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50.

    “The above drawing by William C. Young, architect and builder, is of the model home being erected at the intersection of Watsonia Blvd. [now Marshall Road] and Norwood Ave., North Side, for Mr. and Mrs. John H. Phillips by the Young firm. The home is a combination of all that is modern in electrical equipment and labor saving devices with all that is charming and quaint from the old Norman English Architecture.” Old Pa Pitt thinks of “Norman” as implying the English branch of Romanesque rather than Gothic, but he will not argue about the charm.

    3084 Marshall Road
    Steps to the house

    The steps leading up to the house from Marshall Road are a masterpiece of romanticism in landscape design.

    3084 Marshall Road
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Houses on Bausman Street, Knoxville

    Houses on Bausman Street

    For two blocks, Bausman Street in Knoxville is lined with these houses, which are modest in their dimensions but unusually fine in their design. There are four basic shapes, which repeat in the same order on both sides of the street.

    327 Bausman Street
    327 Bausman Street
    325 Bausman Street
    315 Bausman Street
    313 Bausman Street
    313 Bausman Street

    The houses were built for the Knoxville Land Improvement Company as a speculative venture. Father Pitt has not yet discovered who the architect was, but the developers got their money’s worth from these designs.

    321 Bausman Street
    309 Bausman Street
    311 Bausman Street
    319 Bausman Street

    Knoxville is a bit tattered around the edges at the moment, and a few of these houses have been lost to the ravages of time and poverty—two forces whose destructive power is surpassed only by the even more destructive force of prosperity. The remaining houses ought to be preserved as a document of the best early-twentieth-century styles in middle-class housing, and because, as a streetscape, they are a work of art.

    Houses on Bausman Street
    Sony Alpha 3000.

  • North Hills Estates, Ross Township

    110 Thompson Drive

    North Hills Estates is a suburban plan in Ross Township just north of West View. It was laid out in 1929, and most of the central part was built up in the 1930s—a period when, surprisingly enough, there was quite a bit of house construction going on in the suburbs. For those who had money, it was considered more economical during the Depression to build a new house, what with the low cost of labor and materials, than to buy an existing one. Thousands of houses sat empty, repossessed by lenders, but meanwhile new suburbs like North Hills Estates filled up with beautiful homes.

    This is another article for people who like to scroll through dozens of house designs and marvel at the variety of styles, and at the high quality of almost all the designs.

    (more…)

  • Rafferty Rows, Squirrel Hill

    Rowhouses on Wilkins Avenue

    These two long rows of houses where Beeler Street meets Wilkins Avenue make a striking impression now, but they must have been more striking when they were built in the early 1900s. For several years they sat out in the farmlands of Squirrel Hill, forming a strange urban island (along with two rows of three houses across Beeler Street) in the midst of the otherwise rural East End. We caught them on a dim and rainy evening.

    1910 fire-insurance map.
    Rowhouses on Beeler at Wilkins

    Note how the rhythm of the houses is made more interestingly varied by alternating the peaked and rounded fronts but running the oriels in a series of three.

    Row of houses on Beeler Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Acorn Hill

    3108 Norwood Avenue

    Acorn Hill is a little enclave in the larger neighborhood known to residents as Observatory Hill, and on city planning maps as Perry North. It has some unusually fine houses in a wide variety of styles, built up over a period of about half a century.

    Map of Acorn Hill
    Map of Acorn Hill, adapted from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database License.
    3104 Norwood Avenue
    Dormer
    3104 Norwood Avenue
    3070 Marshall Road

    In any neighborhood this one would be an extraordinary house. It would not be out of place in the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony. The porch has been glassed in and the windows in the dormers have been replaced, but the house retains most of its architectural integrity. Father Pitt does not know the architect yet, but among the local architects known to have been influenced by those German and Austrian art magazines that found their way to Pittsburgh we may mention Frederick Scheibler, Kiehnel & Elliott, and Edward Weber.

    3070 Marshall Road
    3076
    7 Marshall Road
    Dormer
    Gable
    Front of 7 Marshall Road
    Side of 7 Marshall Road
    3080 Marshall Road
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • A Foursquare in Carrick

    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    There’s nothing particularly special about this house, except that it’s a good example of how an architect can vary the incidentals of the usual Pittsburgh Foursquare to produce a pleasing design. The dormer has been altered a bit, but its distinctive central arch remains, though it has been filled with a rectangular stock window.

  • Some Houses on Standish Boulevard in Seminole Hills, Mount Lebanon

    75

    More houses from Seminole Hills, for which no excuse is needed, since the variety of styles and the imaginative designs speak for themselves.

    Turret
    (more…)

  • Some Houses on Greenridge Lane, Green Tree

    1109 Greenridge Lane

    Most Pittsburghers probably think of Green Tree as the quintessential postwar dormitory suburb. The borough does have a longer history, however, and one small area near the intersection of Greentree Road and Potomac Avenue was built up with unusually fine houses in the 1920s and 1930s. Greenridge Lane is part of that little enclave.

    1109
    1126
    1126
    1126
    1127
    1130
    1130
    1131
    1134
    1134

  • Some Queen Anne Houses in Highland Park

    5655 Stanton Avenue

    The Highland Park Residential Historic District, which is coextensive with the neighborhood as defined by the city, preserves more good examples of Queen Anne houses than perhaps any other neighborhood, although Shadyside would come in a close second. Here is an especially splendid Queen Anne mansion on Stanton Avenue. (Addendum: This was the home of architect William Smith Fraser, which he designed and built for himself in 1891.1)

    Perspective view
    Through the trees
    From across the street
    807 Mellon Street

    This house gives us two common Queen Anne elements that were missing from the mansion above: a turret and curved surfaces in the gable.

    Perspective view
    Front of the house in sun
    831–841 North St. Clair Street

    Here is a whole row of Queen Anne houses bulging with stubby turrets. They lean toward the Rundbogenstil end of the spectrum, which Father Pitt mentions because he misses no chance to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”

    833 North St. Clair Street
    5657 Stanton Avenue

    This mansion on Stanton Avenue has been converted to apartments, but its basic outlines remain.

    Front elevation
    5811 Stanton Avenue

    This last one might be better classified as “Stick style,” a closely related style that preceded but overlapped the Queen Anne style. Stick-style houses have more of an emphasis on woodwork, especially boards overlaid on the siding for contrasting trim, as we see here, and less of an emphasis on curves and complexities of form.

    Front elevation
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. Franklin Toker, Pittsburgh: A New Portrait, p. 235. ↩︎

  • A Rainy Evening in Murdoch Farms, Squirrel Hill

    1311 Bennington Avenue
    Architect: Lamont Button.

    It was rainy and dim, so don’t expect too much of these pictures. But old Pa Pitt happened to be in Squirrel Hill just before dark with half an hour to waste, so he took a walk in the rain in Murdoch Farms, one of the richest parts of Squirrel Hill, and did what he could with the camera.

    5458 Fair Oaks Street
    5462 Fair Oaks Street
    Architect: Edward Crump.
    1200 Bennington Avenue
    1320 Bennington Avenue
    5450 Fair Oaks Street
    5357 Fair Oaks Street
    5357 Fair Oaks Street
    1331 Bennington Avenue
    1310 Bennington Avenue
    5367 Fair Oaks Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.