The whole length of Kenmont Avenue is included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. The southern half of the street has some charming cottages from the 1920s or so, and as a bonus one of the oldest houses in Mount Lebanon.
This is the old house: the Dr. Joseph McCormick house, built before the Civil War, as the hand-lettered plaque from the Mount Lebanon Historical Society tells us.
A few more houses from the St. Clair Terrace plan in Mount Lebanon. As always in these interwar Mount Lebanon neighborhoods, the variety and quality of the designs are both striking.
This kind of house, with its front door in a cone-capped turret, is known to Pittsburghers as a “Normandy.”
We visited again on a cloudy day to get pictures of some of the houses we had to skip the last time we visited Hoodridge Drive, when the sun was from the wrong direction.
In some of these pictures old Pa Pitt took out the utility cables. With others he despaired.
Longuevue Drive is one of the streets in Beverly Heights, one of the plans from the 1920s that make the Mount Lebanon Historic District a museum of interwar domestic architecture. The variety of styles is delightful. One gets the impression that all the rules have been repealed, and you can have whatever house your most childish fantasy specifies, from a French château to a fairy-tale witch’s cottage.
We have dozens of pictures if you choose to see them, but because there are so many, we put them behind a “more” link.
(more…)
St. Clair Terrace is another housing plan laid out in the 1920s, with many of the houses built then or in the next decade. It’s included in the Mt. Lebanon Historic District. Here we have some houses on St. Clair Place.
Now a few of the houses on Roycroft Avenue, including some imaginative ones.
(more…)
Beverly Heights is one of several housing plans from the 1920s that make up the Mt. Lebanon Historic District, one of the best-preserved examples of the 1920s automobile suburb in the country. Mission Hills set the pattern: picturesquely curving streets with plenty of open spaces, and matching setbacks for the houses, but otherwise homeowners hired their own architects and exercised their own taste. The result is a pleasing diversity of styles that makes every street an adventure.
Old Pa Pitt is going to be returning to Mount Lebanon a few more times to document the Historic District, so expect more in the coming weeks.
