Seminole Terrace is not included yet in the Mount Lebanon Historic Discrict, but the older part of the plan is a museum of good domestic architecture from the 1920s and 1930s—a time when the Colonial Revival, the Fairy-Tale Style, and various other fantasies of an elegant past could coexist comfortably in a newly laid-out automobile suburb. Here are some of the houses we saw on a walk along Navahoe Drive. We’ve seen some of these houses before, but we can always see them again.
Navahoe Drive is just outside the Mount Lebanon Historic District, but it is lined with architecturally significant houses, mostly from the 1930s. It is a curious thing that there was something of a boom in homebuilding in the Depression years. Labor rates were low, so the conventional wisdom was that, if you could afford a home, you would get more for your money by building a new one than by buying an older one. Thus there were many empty houses owned by banks that had foreclosed on them and could not dispose of them, but also many new houses going up, sometimes in the same neighborhoods.
We have quite a few more houses beyond the “more” link.
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