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.
Father Pitt would not hesitate to affirm that this is one of the finest blocks of Second Empire houses in North America. Manchester has had its difficulties, but it has some outstanding streetscapes to show us.
These houses were built in 1910, and nothing like their brisk modernity had been seen in Pittsburgh. Frederick Scheibler was our most adventurous modernist in those days, and these would have been approved by the Bauhaus ten or twenty years later.
The two houses on the upper end of the upper row have been kept in near-original condition, though they are in less than perfect shape.
In the rest of the row, different ownerships have sent the houses careening off in various directions.
Like many architects of terraces like these, Scheibler repeated this design in multiple locations. Apparently both Scheibler and his clients considered the design a success. We’ll be seeing more of these little houses.
South 11th street is a narrow street of little rowhouses, many dating from before the Civil War. Here are a few random views on the southern end of the street.
A short evening stroll on two blocks’ worth of Boyle Street, one of those narrow rowhouse-lined streets on the North Side near Allegheny General Hospital. The street sign above is on a corner house; the sign probably dates from the late 1800s, and the house, though altered with new windows and other adaptations, may date from before the Civil War.
The basement door makes us think of Alice in Wonderland.
This Second Empire row was probably put up in the 1870s or 1880s, replacing earlier smaller houses. Thirty years ago this was a poor neighborhood, but now much restoration is being done, without wholesale displacement of the older residents.
You have a blank wall facing an alley? We can do something about that. The mural is by Jeremy Raymer, who has beautified many spots around the city, especially in Lawrenceville and on the North Side.
An Italianate house, again altered with new windows, but preserving a splendid doorframe and some original carved wooden brackets.
An unusually attractive small apartment building whose details are well preserved. Addendum: It was built in about 1910, and the architects were Allison & Allison.1
In the shadows of the ever-encroaching university and hospital buildings, these tiny rowhouses still survive in a little alley in the back streets of Oakland.
This row of houses on Alder Street in Shadyside has been attributed to Frederick Scheibler, Pittsburgh’s most famous home-grown modernist, by the guesswork of certain architectural historians. But Martin Aurand, Scheibler’s biographer, could find no evidence that Scheibler designed them. Then who was responsible for this strikingly modern early-twentieth-century terrace?
Old Pa Pitt is confident that he has the answer. The architect was T. Ed. Cornelius, who lived all his life in Coraopolis but was busy throughout the Pittsburgh area. We can be almost certain of that attribution because the houses in the middle of the row are identical to the ones in the Kleber row in Brighton Heights:
And the Brighton Heights houses were the subject of a photo feature in the Daily Post of March 5, 1916, in which T. Ed. Cornelius is named as the architect.
The Alder Street houses are bookended by larger double houses, one of which—this being Pittsburgh, of course—is an odd shape to fit the odd lot.
So remember the name of T. Ed. (which stands for Thomas Edward) Cornelius when you think of distinctive Pittsburgh architecture. It is quite a compliment to have your work mistaken for Frederick Scheibler’s.
Thomas Scott designed this terrace of four houses, built in 1912,1 and they are kept in remarkably fine shape. The updates have been handled with taste and an understanding of the original style, so that today there is hardly a finer Beaux-Arts terrace of cheap little rowhouses in the city. We have talked before about the challenge of making inexpensive housing seem attractive; it was a challenge that Scott met and conquered.
The doors of the two end units are framed in scrupulously proper Doric fashion.
The two inner units have these unique sawed-off arches over their front doors.
