Old Pa Pitt knows exactly two things about the architect W. E. Laughner: first, that he had his office in the Ohio Valley Trust Building; second, that he designed this house for his own home. Both facts come from one small listing in the American Contractor for July 14, 1923: “Coraopolis, Pa.—Res. 2½ sty. & bas. Ridge av. Archt. W. E. Laughner, Ohio Valley Trust bldg. Owner W. E. Laughner, Ridge & Chestnut sts. Brk. veneer. Drawing plans.”
At any rate, this is an interesting variant on the Dutch Colonial style, with Arts-and-Crafts details that make it stand out from its neighbors. It was a good advertisement for Mr. Laughner’s architectural practice, and we suspect there are many Laughner houses lurking here and there waiting for us to discover.
An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.
Stone below and shingle above—a popular combination in the 1920s, but almost all such houses have had their shingles replaced with artificial siding. On this house in Dormont, however, the shingles remain. The roof and windows are newer replacements, but otherwise this house stands just about as it was originally built.
These pictures are very large; be careful on a metered connection.
Note how the basement garage door is carefully matched to the rest of the house.
You see them everywhere in Pittsburgh neighborhoods: those big cube-shaped houses with a pyramid roof, a house-wide porch, and a big dormer facing the front.
House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
This is the Pittsburgh Foursquare, the local variety of the American Foursquare. It was a style especially popular, with variations, in the years from about 1890 to about 1930.
House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
These houses are called “foursquare” because they look square, and the ground floor usually has four rooms, counting the reception hall with the grand staircase, which in those civilized days was often the largest room in the house. The stairway usually had a landing with a big art-glass window to impress visitors.
Staircase with stained glass in a Beechview house.
These windows often go missing—sometimes because they are stolen if the house is vacant for a while, and sometimes because, in the middle twentieth century, it was so embarrassingly old-fashioned to have stained glass in one’s house that people either covered the windows with heavy curtains or replaced them with something more in line with modern taste, like glass block. Nevertheless, there are thousands of them still in place in Pittsburgh houses.
On the second floor were three or four bedrooms and a bathroom (and usually a linen closet the size of a small room). The third floor generally had two more full-sized rooms, which might be used as servants’ quarters.
The most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh version is usually a steeper pitch of the roof, allowing more space in the two rooms on the third floor and giving the houses a taller and beefier appearance than the Midwestern varieties of the species. It is also true that the Pittsburgh version is designed to make the best use of narrow city lots, giving the homeowner as much “detached” house as can be squashed into a lot typically thirty feet wide. For that reason, Pittsburgh Foursquares are usually considerably deeper than they are wide. The design is exceptionally efficient in cramming square footage into a city lot, even allowing for the reception hall, which later generations would consider wasted space.
House on Koehler Street in Mount Oliver.
Whole blocks in streetcar neighborhoods of the early 1900s are lined with these houses.
Alton Street, Beechview.Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.Penn Avenue, Mount Oliver.
Though the basic shape varied little, decorative details like the dormer could make the house distinctive.
House on Koehler Street, Mount Oliver.
Pittsburgh Foursquares are built in all materials—frame, brick, stone, and occasionally concrete block.
Awnings used to be a big business in Pittsburgh. The awning men would come to your house in the spring and put canvas awnings over your doors and windows for summer shade, and then in the fall they would come around and take down the awnings and take them away to be cleaned and put in storage, and then in the spring you would get fresh awnings again. (You can still find one or two services that will do that for you.)
Obviously you have to spend some money on this service, and that limited it largely to the upper middle classes and above. When someone had the brilliant idea of making awnings out of cheap aluminum, however, the floodgates were opened, and every working-class house could at least have a little awning over its front door to shelter the residents while they fumbled for their keys in the rain.
On some streets—as here on 24th Street—you can still pass one aluminum awning after another, often a bit bedraggled but still clinging to its house.
These awnings were made by a number of different manufacturers, and they came in a wide variety of shapes.
Aluminum awnings were supposedly open to the objection that, when the sun was beating on them, they created a pocket of hot air under them. (How much of a worry this really is old Pa Pitt could not tell you, but it sounded plausible in the mouth of a salesman.) The problem was supposedly solved, however, by the ingenuity of the Kool Vent Metal Awning Corp. of America,1 which invented and patented diagonal louvers on the sides of the awning that were supposed to allow the hot air to escape from under the awning—an invention described thus:
An awning adapted to be fastened to a wall or the like support, including a curtain comprising a series of spaced overlapping parallel vertical depending plates, angling outwardly from the awning toward the wall at not more than ninety degrees.
Here we see the diagonal arrangement, designed so that the “vertical depending plates” still provide reasonable shelter from blowing rain but allow air to escape between them. Other awning companies imitated this arrangement, but Kool Vent successfully sued them, enforced its patent, and became the king of the aluminum-awning companies.
The architectural historian Franklin Toker facetiously suggested that the South Side should be declared a Kool Vent Awning historic district, and although other neighborhoods—Bloomfield, for example, and South Oakland—also have large Kool Vent infestations, the South Side probably preserves Kool Vent awnings and their competitors in greater numbers and density than any other neighborhood. All the awnings in this article were found in one block of South 24th Street.
At various times the name seems to have been spelled Kool-Vent and Koolvent as well; here we adopt the spelling used in court documents. ↩︎
There’s that name again: Charette, indicating to the initiated that something architecturally interesting is going on. A “charette,” as we mentioned when we visited Charette Way downtown, is architects’ slang for a session of intense work to meet a deadline, and the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club for many years was called The Charette.
Charette Place is a small one-street subdivision in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, developed by the firm of Ackley & Bradley in 1941. When it was new, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described it as “unique in that the plot is owned and the homes are planned, built and sold by the architects.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 13, 1941.
These are pleasant little houses, not towering works of genius. They do what they’re supposed to do: they make up a street of economical homes where each house is different, but all go together. Though most of them have gone through various alterations, the neighborhood keeps its unified character.
Four houses at the southern end of the Uptown business district in Mount Lebanon. First is what we might call a center-hall foursquare—the basic foursquare design, but widened to place the reception hall in the center and add a library or second parlor to one side.
It is fairly unusual to find a brick-and-shingle house with the wood shingles still intact, even in a rich neighborhood. Here is one with its original roof, its original shingles, and either its original shutters or good replacements.
Here is a kind of Tudor or English Manor design with a very vertical idea of half-timbering.
Finally, a house of a later generation, probably the late 1920s. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but the second-floor oriel in a front-facing gable was a favorite device of Lamont Button.
A two-century-old log cabin preserved in a Moon Township park. The Moon Township Historical Society gives us its history: it was built about twelve miles from here in 1825 for John Coventry, a Revolutionary War veteran who would already have been fairly old when he built this house. It was inhabited until the later twentieth century, but by the middle 1970s it was abandoned. It was carefully taken apart, with every piece labeled, and reassembled here in Robin Hill Park on the grounds of the old Nimick mansion (about which more soon).
Note the tool marks on the stone slabs used as steps. Barry Fell would probably have read them as Celtic inscriptions.
A lot of care went into shaping the logs to lock together at the corners.
The chimney is made of irregular local stones skillfully arranged.
You may have noticed this tombstone in front of the cabin if you were looking at the pictures above closely. Father Pitt does not know its story—whether it was moved here with the cabin, or whether it was here before the cabin was reconstructed. Perhaps someone from the Historical Society can enlighten us. The inscription is quite legible in spite of a few missing letters:
HENRY ATEN DIED APRIL 11, 1877, AGED 63 YEARS, 6 MOS. & 16 DA[YS.]
[Ble]ssed are the dead who die in the [Lo]rd, for they rest from their labors [a]nd their works do follow them.
Most of us walk right by this building without giving it much thought, but it stands for a momentous transition in the history of the city. According to the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, it is probably the last building constructed as a single-family house in downtown Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh began in the small triangle that is downtown today, and through the first half of the 1800s, a large part of the population remained within those limits. The city was a warren of narrow streets and narrower alleys where little houses crowded with stores and workshops. After the Civil War, though, the land downtown simply became too valuable to build houses on. The family who built this Italianate house on Penn Avenue, where a number of well-to-do families still lived, could not have guessed that they would be the last to build a house in the Triangle, but they would certainly have been aware that the city was changing rapidly.
The Italianate details need a bit of polishing up, but they are still well preserved.
This is the edge of the section locals call Billy Buck Hill, the bulge in the Slopes enclosed by a long loop of South 18th Street. These houses along South 18th Street were built shortly before 1910, according to old maps; they are a little grander than some of their neighbors behind them, and they are good exercises in urban archaeology. Not one of them is in original condition, but we can probably reconstruct what they looked like when they were new by comparing the houses.
First, four out of the five share a blank spot in the wall above the front door that seems unusual. You would expect a window there. The fifth has a window, though it’s an odd oval shape. Nevertheless, that oval window appears to be original. We can tell nothing from the third and fourth houses in the row, which have had their entire fronts replaced with fake stone, but a close look at the first and second houses (enlarge the picture to examine them) shows that the bricks in the front walls have been filled in just where such a window would be, and in a roughly oval shape.
That projecting second-floor window on the fifth house is also unusual, but here old Pa Pitt is inclined to say it is probably not original. It looks like a local contractor’s more modern renovation. The second house is probably the only one that preserves the original shapes of its windows upstairs and downstairs, although the windows themselves have been replaced.
All the dormers have been renovated in various ways, but the ones on the first and fifth houses may be closest to what all the dormers originally looked like.
The first and fifth houses also preserve their original chimneys. Two of the others have lost their tops, and the chimney on the third house has been rebuilt from the same stone substitute that was used for the front.
Three of the houses have aluminum awnings. The ones on the second and third houses are genuine Kool-Vent.
