These houses date from before 1872, to judge by both old maps and the general shape of the houses. Some have been more drastically altered than others. Old Pa Pitt is particularly interested in the one that has had a new “used-brick” façade added, but whose sides—as you can just make out in this picture—are still sheathed in asphalt sheets with a cartoon stone pattern.
Each one of them has had its individual adventures, but it seems fairly certain that this row of half a dozen frame houses with narrow dormers dates from before 1872. Together they form something of a manual or catalogue of things that can happen to a frame house in Pittsburgh over the course of a century and a half.
This exceptionally fine Second Empire house sits at the end of a row, and therefore has two exposed surfaces for the architect to play with. Victorian architects did not like plain flat surfaces, and whoever designed this house lost no opportunity to vary the shape and texture.
Old Pa Pitt is not sure whether the woodwork on this South Side rowhouse is original or the work of a more recent craftsman. Either way, it is charmingly folksy, and the polychrome color scheme is well chosen to bring out the details.
In a Victorian rowhouse, the parlor window—the ground-floor window facing the street—was an opportunity for the homeowners to display their taste and, even more important, their ability to pay skilled craftsmen to decorate their houses with woodwork and stained or leaded glass. Above, even the masonry is incised with decorative patterns.
Dormers with carved and painted decorations on a Second-Empire-style house at Jane and 28th Streets, South Side.
Fall colors on the sidewalk of Jane Street.
The last block of Jane Street on the South Side Flats (as opposed to the resumed Jane Street on the Slopes side of the tracks) feels delightfully private, lined on the north side with charming Second Empire rowhouses facing an old herringbone-pattern brick sidewalk. The colors of the houses and flowers shine out all the brighter in the gloom of a rainy day.
