The little rowhouses on Pierce Street were built as rental properties for Andrew W. Mellon, who was not too rich to squeeze a few pennies out of working-class tenants. The houses had a fine location right next to the Roup station on the main commuter-rail line to the east, and they are still right next to its successor, the Negley station on the East Busway. Old Pa Pitt visited them on an August evening, and the fact that these pictures are appearing only now shows how backed up we sometimes get around here. We have some history of the Pierce Street rowhouses in an earlier article.
Pierce Street is unusual in Pittsburgh; it looks more like a street in Baltimore, with an entire block of identical houses all built more or less as one building, their fronts right against the sidewalk.
A few of the houses on one side of the street have disappeared, replaced by parking lot; but the streetscape is still intact enough to show us what it originally looked like.
It appears that most of the houses are in the hands of the same owner and kept up beautifully with identical stoop plantings.
Not all of them, however; a couple are still obviously in private hands and were not repointed when the rest of the houses were restored.
This corner house was left isolated when a few houses to the left were demolished.
These brick rowhouses—or double houses with narrow passages between—are a little more substantial than the frame houses on the other side of the street, but they fit with them in scale. The decorated cornices and dormers elevate these houses from common lower-class rowhouses to common middle-class rowhouses, and they have been attractively restored.
On an otherwise commercialized section of Centre Avenue, this little U-shaped terrace of rowhouses is almost invisible. As in Dover Gables, the fronts are arranged around a vehicle-free garden court.
Hollywood Place is a plan of narrow little rowhouses built in 1892–1893 in California-Kirkbride, or Calbride as it’s usually called in the neighborhood. There were originally 137 houses, but many have vanished over the years. Today the plan is part of the Old Allegheny Rows Historic District.
The 1890 plat map shows the tract, before the houses were built, as the property of D. Herbert Hostetter, the patent-medicine king. The houses, “built in rows after the Philadelphia plan” (as one newspaper put it), were built for Herbert DuPuy, whose wife, Amy Hostetter, had inherited the property. In 1903, they were swapped for other properties to Frank McCann.
Most of what old Pa Pitt knows about this plan comes from the National Register nomination for the Old Allegheny Rows Historic District (PDF), and we quote the relevant paragraph:
In the early 1890’s the housing market in Pittsburgh boomed due to a tremendous industrial expansion. According to one newspaper report, the type of housing most in demand was small, modestly priced, rental houses. In order to meet this demand, Herbert DuPuy, a noted Pittsburgh industrialist, made plans for a large speculative housing development. The development was to be constructed on six blocks of undeveloped land north of California Avenue that his wife. Amy Hostetter, had inherited. The construction of the DuPuy development began in 1892 and was referred to as “Hollywood place”. When completed, Hollywood place was to consist of 300 to 400, four-to-six-room, row houses. According to contemporary newspapers, the development was based on the “Philadelphia Plan”, apparently a term used to describe planned communities of row houses. DuPuy’s project included architecturally-resplendent houses on the larger streets and modest residences on the alleys. The houses were done in a Victorian vernacular style with sheet metal architectural detailing, and porches on the larger buildings made from standard pieces of millwork. The completion of the project was hindered by the Panic of 1893 and the Homestead Riots near Pittsburgh. Only 137 of the proposed 300-400 row houses were constructed. The scale and style of the “Hollywood place” row housing is unique in Pittsburgh. The development features a number of interesting and varying architectural elements, but at the same time has a mass-produced appearance that is different from the more random developments along Brighton Place.
Here is an epitome of the neighborhood: two houses neatly restored and beautifully kept, one house condemned.
It looks as though some effort was made to restore this house, too, but the effort ran out of steam.
Some of the houses have been put back together on a low budget, with stock parts like the home-center front door on this house.
In spite of the gaps, this view of the sidewalk of Sedgwick Street shows us something of how these streets must have looked when all the houses were standing.
The decorations on these houses were more elaborate than usual for small houses, and the architect must have enjoyed himself planning them.
Note also the carved wood of the window frames in this house, where the decorations have been emphasized in mint green and gold.
The gaps where houses have disappeared can be taken as opportunities for delightful little gardens.
These houses on Morrison Street have been restored to a very high standard.
The long gap on Morrison Street gives us a chance to look at the side of one of the houses, and we can see that it is generously deep. There is more room in these little houses than you would think.
The houses in the eastern section of the plan were built to a simpler design; they may have come later in the development.
The thick and high evergreens leave just enough gap to make the entrance to an enchanted world. So it seems from the street, and the garden beyond the mystic gate does not disappoint us.
Dover Gables is still a bit of a mystery to old Pa Pitt; no one seems to have pinned down the architect. The combination of simple Tudor-style rows of houses with lush landscaping crams the greatest load of picturesqueness possible into a tiny patch of land.
Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.
For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.
Inglenook Place is something unique: a whole street where all the houses were designed by our noted early modernist Frederick Scheibler. There are two qualifications to be made here: first, one house on the corner of Oakmont Street, addressed to Inglenook Place, is not a Scheibler house; and second, there are two more blocks of Inglenook Place on the map, but they are a stairway with no houses addressed to it.
Here we see, at the end of the row, the one oddball house on the street.
These houses are two of Scheibler’s simplest designs, obviously meant to be built as cheaply as possible; but his modernist instinct is on full display in them. The larger group was built in 1907, all in this straightforward design; a second, smaller group was built in 1909 in a different though also simple design.
This is slightly less straightforward in that Scheibler has played with the rhythm of four houses in a row by putting the upstairs windows in three groups of 1, 4, 1.
Unfortunately, the neighborhood fell on hard times, and about a third of the houses are abandoned and will probably vanish eventually. When that happens, we’ll lose one more unique streetscape, in spite of the valiant efforts of neighborhood advocates.
This sign is so ancient that it dates from a time when it was normal to do lettering by hand on public signs. A designer of today would be baffled if you said you didn’t want every occurrence of the letter E to look the same: how would you even do that?
This row of houses on Middle Street has a complicated history, and old Pa Pitt is not sure of all the details. A row of four brick houses stood here at least as early as the 1880s. At some point in the 1930s or thereabouts, they appear to have been refaced with yellow and white face brick, and given metal-framed casement windows typical of modernist buildings of the era. It is possible that they were rebuilt, but Father Pitt leans toward saying they were the same houses with new faces, because he recalls noticing what appeared to be older chimneys in plain red brick.
In 2019, the houses were thoroughly renovated again, with the main parts of the houses restored to the way they would have looked in the 1800s, but a new postpostmodern third floor that gives each house a delightful balcony and a bright upper room.
