Old Pa Pitt is not quite sure how to classify this house. It is a sort of Jacobean or Tudor Gothic, but with very Victorian woodwork on the gables. We shall call it “Jacobean with gingerbread.”
Addendum: This is the Remsen V. Messler house; the architects were Peabody & Stearns, who designed several other Tudorish mansions around here, as well as the Liberty Market (now Motor Square Garden) and the Horne’s department store.
A typical courtyard apartment building in a corner of Mount Lebanon that is full of small to medium-sized apartment buildings. This one is in a simple but attractive Jacobean style, where a few effective details carry all the thematic weight.
This small skyscraper was not originally built as a skyscraper. The first part of it was put up in 1907; in 1917 five more storeys were added (very skillfully, we might add), bringing the building just about high enough to qualify as a small skyscraper in old Pa Pitt’s admittedly fluid definition of the term. The architects both times were MacClure & Spahr, who also gave us the Union National Bank Building and the Diamond Building, among others. Since 1952, this building has belonged to the city, which calls it the John P. Robin Civic Building.
Harry Darlington built this house in 1908 for his son, Harry Darlington Junior. The son’s house was two doors down from the father’s (separated by the widow Holmes’ house), but the two houses could hardly be more different in style. Where the father’s is tall, narrow, and massive, this is (comparatively) low and spreading. The architect was George S. Orth, who also designed the William Penn Snyder house a block away on Ridge Avenue.
Benjamin Franklin Jones, Jr., was the Jones of Jones & Laughlin, the steel conglomerate. This 42-room Jacobean mansion was designed by Rutan & Russell. Like most of the ultragazillionaires’ mansions in Allegheny West, it now belongs to the Community College of Allegheny County.
