Tag: Mansions

  • 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.
  • Moreland-Hoffstot House, Shadyside

    Putti on the porch roof of the Moreland-Hoffstot House

    If you wanted your house to convey the message “I’m rich ppttttttthhht,” then Paul Irwin was the architect to hire. This Renaissance palace uses every trick in the architect’s vocabulary to tell the world that a millionaire lives here, and he is richer than you are. It was built in 1914 on the Fifth Avenue Millionaires’ Row, where, although it is not the biggest of the surviving mansions, it somehow manages to look like the most expensive.

    Moreland-Hoffstot House
    Moreland-Hoffstot House
    Porch
    Porch roof with putti
    Urn
    West side of the house
    Moreland-Hoffstot House
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • More of Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill from the front

    The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.

    Front door
    Perspective view of Robin Hill
    Right side of Robin Hill
    Perspective view of the garden side
    Garden face of the mansion
    Robin Hill mansion seen from the gazebo
    Back door of Robin Hill
    Window of Robin Hill
    Stairs up from the garden
    Left side of Robin Hill
    Garden face of Robin Hill
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.

  • Front Door of the B. F. Jones House, Allegheny West

    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    Steel baron B. F. Jones’ front doorway is a feast of elaborate terra cotta. This is a very large picture: enlarge it to appreciate the details of the terra cotta and ironwork.

  • Warwick House, Squirrel Hill

    Front of Warwick House

    Warwick House was built in 1910 for Howard Heinz, son of the ketchup king H. J. Heinz. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, who designed several other millionaires’ mansions around here, as well as a number of fine churches. The house now belongs to the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, and it is rented to Opus Dei for a dollar a year, under the condition that the tenants undertake the maintenance, which is enormous.

    Once a year the residents throw a big open house, which gave us a chance to get a few pictures. We would have got more, but we were having too much fun.

    Warwick House
    Front of Warwick House
    Front door
    French door in the rear

    A French door in the back leading out into the garden.

    Warwick House

    The rear of the ballroom, an addition built in about 1929. It is now a chapel.

    Arbor

    An arbor with some splendid ironwork runs along the back of the garden.

    Decorative ironwork along the arbor
    Ironwork

    From an earlier visit, we also have several pictures of the interior of Warwick House.

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Most of the pictures are HDR stacks of three photographs at different exposures.

  • Garden Face of Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill from the back patio
    Composite of three photographs from a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

    Old Pa Pitt had intended to place this picture with the rest of the pictures of Robin Hill the other day, but his automatic stitching software failed him. He had been reasonably careful in taking the three photographs so that they would line up nearly perfectly, but the stitching software produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry. What went wrong? Only because Father Pitt was stubborn enough to edit the “control points” himself—“control points” being identical features marked in two pictures, so that the software knows how to align them properly—did he discover the problem. The parade of identical windows was too much for the program. The extreme symmetry caused it to identify this window as the same as that window, which caused the whole building to collapse in a heap.

    So old Pa Pitt stubbornly picked out all the control points himself, and produced a nearly perfect rendering of the garden side of the mansion. Stubbornness is a character flaw, but it has its uses.

  • Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill

    Robin Hill was designed for Francis and Mary Nimick by Henry Gilchrist. He gave them a classic Georgian country house, and, like many country houses, it is really meant to be enjoyed from the garden side.

    Back of Robin Hill

    The house was built in 1926, and for nearly half a century the Nimicks enjoyed it. When Mary died in 1971, she willed the whole estate to the township to be preserved as a park.

    Back of Robin Hill
    Back door
    Back door
    Robin Hill
    View of the house through the trees
    Window
    Chimney
    Another chimney
    Side of the house
    Front of the house

    The front of the house presents a dignified appearance to the visitor.

    Front door
    Front of the house
    View of the house through the trees

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Sony Alpha 3000; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

  • Acheson House, Shadyside

    Acheson House

    An elegant Tudor or Jacobean mansion designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1903, as the dormer tells us. This Post-Gazette story (reprinted in a Greenville, North Carolina, paper that does not keep it behind a paywall) tells us that a 1925 addition was designed by Benno Janssen, who had worked in the MacClure & Spahr office and may have had some responsibility for the original design. The article also tells us how vandals masquerading as interior designers rampaged through the house and painted all the interior woodwork white or pale grey to “banish dark wood,” but at least the exterior is in good shape.

    Dormer with the date 1903
    Perspective view of the house
    Side of the house

    Cameras: Nikon COOLPIX P100; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Anderson Manor, Manchester

    Anderson Manor

    Few of the great Greek Revival mansions that surrounded Pittsburgh before the Civil War have survived. This one has, and that alone would make it important. But this one also has a place of high honor in the intellectual history of the United States. This was the home of Colonel James Anderson, the book-lover, who opened his personal library to working boys on Saturday afternoons. One of those boys was Andrew Carnegie, who attributed his later success to the education he got from reading Col. Anderson’s books. When Carnegie established his first public library in Allegheny, he donated a memorial to Col. Anderson to stand outside and remind the city that Carnegie was only following his benefactor’s example. A plaque, set up by somebody who did not understand how quotation marks work, duplicates the original inscription:

    To Colonel James Anderson

    The original house was built in about 1830; additions were made in 1905—a fortunate time, since classical style had come back in fashion, and the additions were in sympathy with the original.

    The house has belonged to various institutions over the years, but many of the details remain intact.

    Main house
    Central section
    Doric capital

    The colonnaded porch-and-balcony has Doric columns below, Ionic above—a scrupulously correct treatment. Doric was regarded as weightier than Ionic, so the lighter-looking columns are supported by the heavier-looking ones. If there were a third level, the columns would be Corinthian, the lightest of the three Greek orders.

    Ionic capital
    Balcony
    Another Ionic capital
    Dormers
    Anderson Manor
    From the south
    Anderson Manor from the north
  • Byers-Lyons House, Allegheny West

    Byers-Lyons House
    Sony Alpha 3000.

    The Byers-Lyons house was built in 1898. It was designed by Alden & Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects, and it has fortunately been preserved by being turned to academic uses—it is now Byers Hall of the Community College of Allegheny County. It looked warm and inviting last night at sunset, so Father Pitt took quite a few pictures.

    Perspective view
    From the corner
    In sunset lights
    Byers Hall
    Iron filigree
    Iron portal
    Silhouetted iron filigree
    Ionic capital in iron
    Ionic capital
    Iron gatepost
    Arcade
    Rntrance porch
    Arcaded porch
    Entrance
    Dormers and chimneys
    Dormer and chimney
    Chimneys