We have seen many answers to the question of how to make a cheap row of small houses attractive. This streamlined terrace is certainly one of the more interesting answers. It would have been even more striking with the original windows and doors and without the aluminum awnings.
West Park is a pleasant neighborhood in Stowe Township and McKees Rocks, whose absurd border runs diagonally through the neighborhood, slicing through a number of buildings along the way. If you wander through the area, as old Pa Pitt was doing the other day, you will doubtless be struck by a certain characteristic look of the architecture around you. A surprisingly large number of buildings are decorated with patterned brickwork in hand-me-down Art Nouveau patterns. There is also a strong preference for the buff and yellowish shades of Kittanning brick. We suspect that one or two very local architects were responsible for most of these buildings, which give the neighborhood such a distinctive look that you could probably guess where you were right away if you woke up on Broadway Avenue with no memory of how you got there.
Father Pitt was taken with this distinctive corner entrance.
This terrace is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. It seems to have been build a little after 1923, filling in a gap between two existing terraces (both of them in buff Kittanning brick). There was room for seven houses in the row, from which the architect created an impression of four-part symmetry. Mathematically and geometrically, it is an impressive feat.
The decorations are also remarkable. The buff-brick stripes certainly stand out (and remind us of several other buildings we’ve seen above), and the Stars of David are, as far as Father Pitt knows, unique in Pittsburgh rowhouses. Father Pitt does not know the history of these houses, but he does note that they are an easy stroll from a large Jewish cemetery.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
Old Pa Pitt enjoys pointing out the many ways architects and builders have answered the terrace question. “This method of building three or six houses under one roof shows a handsome return on the money invested,” said an article about a terrace of houses in Brighton Heights, but the investment pays off only if tenants are willing to move in. The later Aluminum City Terrace development in New Kensington, designed in a starkly modern style by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, had a hard time attracting tenants in spite of cheap rents and an acute housing shortage, because locals thought it looked yucky.
The terrace question, then, is this: How can we build economical housing that is nevertheless attractive enough to seem desirable to tenants?
This terrace obviously had a higher budget than many, so it answered the question with fine design, elaborate decoration, and good materials. The materials were good enough that they have survived intact more than a century: these houses on Denniston Street, twenty-four of them in four rows of six each, were put up before 1923, but they still have their tile roofs and other decorative elements.
Probably because of the steep hill they occupy, these houses have unusually generous front yards—generous enough for a whole container vegetable garden, for instance.
This is the edge of the section locals call Billy Buck Hill, the bulge in the Slopes enclosed by a long loop of South 18th Street. These houses along South 18th Street were built shortly before 1910, according to old maps; they are a little grander than some of their neighbors behind them, and they are good exercises in urban archaeology. Not one of them is in original condition, but we can probably reconstruct what they looked like when they were new by comparing the houses.
First, four out of the five share a blank spot in the wall above the front door that seems unusual. You would expect a window there. The fifth has a window, though it’s an odd oval shape. Nevertheless, that oval window appears to be original. We can tell nothing from the third and fourth houses in the row, which have had their entire fronts replaced with fake stone, but a close look at the first and second houses (enlarge the picture to examine them) shows that the bricks in the front walls have been filled in just where such a window would be, and in a roughly oval shape.
That projecting second-floor window on the fifth house is also unusual, but here old Pa Pitt is inclined to say it is probably not original. It looks like a local contractor’s more modern renovation. The second house is probably the only one that preserves the original shapes of its windows upstairs and downstairs, although the windows themselves have been replaced.
All the dormers have been renovated in various ways, but the ones on the first and fifth houses may be closest to what all the dormers originally looked like.
The first and fifth houses also preserve their original chimneys. Two of the others have lost their tops, and the chimney on the third house has been rebuilt from the same stone substitute that was used for the front.
Three of the houses have aluminum awnings. The ones on the second and third houses are genuine Kool-Vent.
Two rows of houses, both in the Italianate style, but at different scales.
These more modest houses are, in form, the typical Pittsburgh city house of the nineteenth century. They are raised above the common herd by Italianate detailing, such as the cornice brackets and elaborate entrances.
These taller and grander houses share many of the same stylistic traits as their smaller neighbors, but they have full third floors, and everything is of a slightly higher grade, including the arched windows and transom over the front door.
The far end of Manchester still has some work to do. A few houses have been restored; about an equal number are abandoned and condemned. A few have been restored, and then abandoned and condemned. A few have been renovated in a way that seems regrettable. We can only hope that someone will rescue the houses that need rescuing.
It is always especially sad when we see that the last thing residents were able to do to their house was decorate it for Christmas.
Here we have a frame house refurbished to be habitable and comfortable. “Multipane” windows were used, of course, because is there any other kind? (Old Pa Pitt was shocked to visit a house with modern “multipane” windows and discover that the “panes” are really just cartoon lines drawn in plastic across a single sheet of glass.)
This house suffered a fire years ago and appears to have been abandoned since then. At least some minimal work has been done to stabilize it. The dormer is distinctive; it would have been more so with its original decorative woodwork.
We find some of the houses in better shape as we approach the western end of the street.
The part of Dutchtown south of East Ohio Street is a tiny but densely packed treasury of Victorian styles. Old Pa Pitt took a walk on Avery Street the other evening, when the sun had moved far enough around in the sky to paint the houses on the southeast side of the street.
Is this the most beautiful breezeway in Pittsburgh? It’s certainly in the running.
A row of identical houses put up in 1884 for Joseph Klee, a successful manufacturer of shoes and one of the founders of the Rodef Shalom congregation. The word “Klee” means “clover” in German, so, of course…
…all the dormers have clover ornaments.
Note the basement-level breezeway between houses, which is very unusual in Pittsburgh.
A year ago we published this picture of a row of houses in Manchester, with the second from the left under sentence of condemnation after a fire. At the time we were not sure whether it would be worth enough to restore. But it has been restored, and the whole row is looking neat and attractive again:
You would hardly know anything had happened except for a bit of soot on the bricks, which is hardly news in Pittsburgh, and the fact that the trim has been painted black.
Beech Avenue may be old Pa Pitt’s favorite residential street in the city. It is an eclectic mix of Victorian styles lined up on brick sidewalks, and something about it makes first-time visitors think, “I want to stay here forever.”
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