Queen Anne is an expansive style, with turrets and bays and oriels and all kinds of picturesque projections this way and that. When Queen Anne is compressed to the dimensions of a rowhouse, it takes on some of the vocabulary of the Second Empire style, in particular the full third floor under a mansard roof, but adds the irregularity we expect from Queen Anne, with its asymmetry and, of course, its turrets. These two houses on North Avenue are splendidly preserved examples of the collision of the two styles.
The Highland Park Residential Historic District, which is coextensive with the neighborhood as defined by the city, preserves more good examples of Queen Anne houses than perhaps any other neighborhood, although Shadyside would come in a close second. Here is an especially splendid Queen Anne mansion on Stanton Avenue. (Addendum: This was the home of architect William Smith Fraser, which he designed and built for himself in 1891.1)
This house gives us two common Queen Anne elements that were missing from the mansion above: a turret and curved surfaces in the gable.
Here is a whole row of Queen Anne houses bulging with stubby turrets. They lean toward the Rundbogenstil end of the spectrum, which Father Pitt mentions because he misses no chance to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”
This mansion on Stanton Avenue has been converted to apartments, but its basic outlines remain.
This last one might be better classified as “Stick style,” a closely related style that preceded but overlapped the Queen Anne style. Stick-style houses have more of an emphasis on woodwork, especially boards overlaid on the siding for contrasting trim, as we see here, and less of an emphasis on curves and complexities of form.
Three identical houses with all the signature quirks of the Queen Anne style: turrets, odd angles, curved surfaces, oriels, shingles, and every other effect that can be applied to a city house to make it more picturesque.
Even though it has lost some decorative details over the years, Castle Stanton still drops jaws of passers-by who find themselves in unfamiliar territory here on the border of East Liberty and Highland Park. It looks like a 1920s Hollywood set: we expect Douglas Fairbanks dressed as Robin Hood to leap from an upstairs window and land on his feet after a series of spectacular acrobatics.
This advertisement from the Pittsburgh Press, September 21, 1930, shows us some of the pointy bits that have since been removed.
This Hollywood front hides an unexpected secret, which will be revealed if we walk around to the side of the building.
Now we see the outlines of an older Queen Anne mansion, converted to an apartment house by the addition of a Hollywood-fantasy front facing Stanton Avenue.
Homewood is prospering now more than it has done in decades, but there are still many forgotten corners. This house, in the part of Homewood traditionally called Brushton, has been abandoned and forgotten for a very long time, though the other houses on the street are inhabited and well kept. Because it has been left alone for decades, it preserves details of crumbling shingle and woodwork that have been replaced on all its neighbors. It appears to have been built in the 1890s for J. M. Gruber, and it is a good example of how the Queen Anne style filtered down to the middle classes.
Alpha Terrace, a set of unusually fine Victorian rowhouses designed by James T. Steen1 in an eclectic Romanesque with bits of Second Empire and Gothic thrown in, is a historic district of its own. The houses are on both sides of Beatty Street in East Liberty. The row on the northwest side of the street went up in about 1885.
The houses on the southeast side of the street are a few years newer, probably from about 1894, and they incorporate more of the Queen Anne style, with shingles and ornate woodwork.
The rest of our pictures are from the sunny side of the street, for very practical photographic reasons. We’ll return when the light is better for the houses on the southeast side.
Separate ownership is not always kind to terraces like this, but the aluminum siding on the roof is about the worst alteration Alpha Terrace has suffered.
Old Pa Pitt is nearly certain of this attribution. The Wikipedia article, possibly following the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, attributes the design to Murphy & Hamilton, but Father Pitt is fairly sure that Murphy & Hamilton were contractors, not architects; they probably built the terraces. Alpha Terrace is attributed to Steen in a Historic Resource Survey Form for another of his buildings that was demolished anyway (PDF). The style of Alpha Terrace is very similar to the style of Steen’s downtown YMCA (demolished long ago), which, though it was on a much grander scale, used the same prickly witch’s caps and squarish dormers; it was pictured in the American Architect and Building News for February 10, 1883. ↩︎
A pair of stylish Victorian houses opposite Arsenal Park on 40th Street. The one on the right is in the high Queen Anne style, with a turret and odd-shaped windows and a wraparound porch. The one on the left is smaller and more restrained, but only relatively.
These two houses have both had quite a bit of work put into them in the past few years. A quarter-century ago, before Lawrenceville began to be a trendy neighborhood, Father Pitt captured these same two houses with a plastic box camera.
Photographed in 1999 with an Imperial 620 camera.
Several things have changed, especially in the house on the left. The porch has been removed; it looks as though it was a later addition, and the removal may have restored the house to something more like its original appearance. The sawed-off Gothic peak on the third floor has been restored. The glass blocks by the front door are still there, but perhaps that is how we know this is a Pittsburgh house and not one in Baltimore or Boston. As for the house on the right, it has been cleaned and restored to picture-perfect condition.
Three quite different interpretations of the Queen Anne turret on Shadyside houses. Above, a pair of faceted turrets on a double house.
An unusual rectangular turret preserves its original farmhouse-Gothic window and woodwork. The turret itself is set at a 45° angle to the rest of the house.
Finally, an octagonal domed turret on a house whose well-preserved details are worth pausing to admire. We note in passing that even the paint is, if not original, at least the dark green color typical of Pittsburgh houses of the turn of the twentieth century: you can scratch the trim of many a Pittsburgh house and find this color at the lowest level.
An appropriate arrangement of birds on those cables could make a short musical composition.
A shingly front porch that survived the epidemic of porch amputations in the 1960s and 1970s.
The parlor window has some good stained glass under the arch and, in the arch itself, a sunflower ornament for a keystone.
The “Queen Anne” style is the one people think of most often when they think of Victorian houses. It had very little to do with any queen named Anne. Its defining characteristic is a concern for variety and picturesqueness: there is always a surprise lurking around the corner of a Queen Anne house. Turrets and Dutch gables and curiously shaped dormers and fits of Renaissance detailing are favorite devices of Queen Anne architects, but there is no single thing that defines the style.
Coraopolis has an exceptionally fine collection of Queen Anne houses, and some of them preserve exquisite details usually lost to the ravages of time. Enlarge the picture above, for example, and admire the original windows.
This one has had many revisions over the years, but the irregular shape of a Queen Anne house, and the dominant turret, are still there to mark the style.
Here is a house that has kept many elegant details, including its slate roof and wood trim. And note the windows in the turret:
The glass curves to match the curve of the wall.
A curious dormer with remarkable tracery in the window.
Another house with some alterations, but they do not disguise the turret and the big rounded bay in front.
This house has also been through some alterations: the porch might have wrapped all the way around to include both doors, and the vertical siding on the second-floor oriel doubtless replaced wood shingles. The shingles are still there on the third-floor gables, however.
