Father Pitt

Tag: Rowhouses

More Houses on North Avenue in the Mexican War Streets

A couple of blocks of North Avenue, where we can see some fine Italianate houses of the Civil War era, interspersed with some towering Queen Anne mansions. We start at the corner of Palo Alto Street, where a Queen Anne house makes the most of a tiny lot by going up to a fourth floor.

These two houses share splendid porches, probably added later, since the porches match even though the houses do not. The owners of the houses have coordinated their efforts, so that the porches match.

Three more modest houses, though their full third floors give them a generous allotment of bedrooms.

A pair of houses that were both the peak of elegance in different eras. The Italianate one on the right goes for a simpler dignity; the Queen Anne on the left pulls out all the stops to make the most picturesque composition possible. Note the relative heights, by the way: high ceilings were a feature of the Italianate style in better houses, so that the house at left adds one more floor in exactly the same vertical height.

Seventeen years ago, Father Pitt published a picture of the front door of the house on the right. The picture was taken on 120 film with a folding Agfa Isolette.

Two simple and attractive Italianate houses, one of which has grown a partial fourth floor.

Here is an interesting document of how the neighborhood has changed. The house at left was originally an Italianate residence; the corner store may have been original or may have been added later. The projecting commercial building next to it, which probably dates from about 1920, was added when the house was taken over by the United States Casket Company, later the Melia Casket Company, which still inhabited the building until about twelve years ago. Both buildings have had a thorough renovation since the casket-makers moved out.

Two different interpretations of Italianate, one of which has sprouted an inartistic dormer to give it a fourth floor.

Finally, a center-hall house in a kind of late Greek Revival style; it occupies a double lot.

Sony Alpha 3000; Kodak EasyShare Z981.

Comments

February 8, 2025
Some Houses on North Avenue on the North Side

An assortment of styles from a block and a half of North Avenue facing the Commons in old Allegheny. These houses are now included in the Mexican War Streets Historic District. First, a tall and narrow Queen Anne house built in the 1880s.

This Queen Anne has a larger lot and thus more room to spread out and grow picturesque projections.

These three houses probably go back to the Civil War era; they are typical of the larger sort of houses that grew all over Pittsburgh from the beginning until the middle 1800s, when more elaborate styles came into fashion.

It is not easy to guess the age of these little houses. Old Pa Pitt’s best speculation, judging from old maps, is that they also go back to the Civil War era, but had their fronts modernized at some time around 1900. The one on the left may have had its front replaced more than once before it finally ended up with this Craftsman-style stucco treatment.

Finally, another house from the 1880s, this one with particularly elaborate woodwork.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Comments

January 27, 2025
Two Front Doors on Sidney Street, South Side

With falling snow for added picturesque effect.

Comments

January 24, 2025
Second Empire Row on North Avenue in Manchester

The Second Empire style is a good fit for high-class rowhouses, because it was created specifically to stuff the most usable volume into the least taxable building. Supposedly it came about because houses in France of Napoleon III’s time were taxed by the area of the rooms, but attics were not counted in the calculation. All the space above the roofline was dismissed as attic by the law; therefore, if the roof could bulge out to make an attic the same size as the other floors, you got an extra floor tax-free. Americans adopted the style because they liked the way it looked and the way it solved the practical problems of space.

This row of seven houses drops a few feet after the first three. Manchester is a flat neighborhood, but only by Pittsburgh standards. Old maps show that the row was built between 1872 and 1882.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100;

A very clever detective might deduce that these pictures were taken on two different visits.

Comments

January 17, 2025
Frame Rowhouses on North Avenue, Manchester

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

Manchester is known for its splendid brick Victorian houses, but there are blocks of more modest houses as well—often older than the big brick ones. Here is a row of neat little frame houses, some of which appear—from both old maps and the style of the houses—to date back to the Civil War era.

Comments

January 15, 2025
Queen Anne Meets Second Empire in Manchester

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.

Canon PowerShot SX150IS; Nikon COOPLPIX P100; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

Comments

January 13, 2025
Row of Houses on Penn Avenue, Strip

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Strip was a chaotic and lively mess of huge industries, small business, and rowhouses. Few of the houses remain; here is one of the surviving rows. These are what old Pa Pitt calls Baltimore-style rowhouses: a row where the houses are all put up as more or less one building, flush up against the sidewalk, with only a set of steps to the front door to separate them from the city outside. These were built as rental houses, probably in the 1890s or very early 1900s; they were still all under the same ownership in 1923, according to old maps. At first they had small back yards on the alley in the rear, but by 1910 those back yards had been filled in with tiny alley houses, which are still there today, and some day when it isn’t so cold old Pa Pitt will walk around to the alley and get their picture, too.

Surprisingly, all the houses in the original group survive. The house on the right end had its front completely rebuilt about ten years ago; the fourth house from the left has had a “picture window” installed in the parlor. The rest of the houses look more or less the way they have always looked.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

Comments

January 10, 2025
Pair of Double Houses in Beechview

Pittsburgh is full of tiny houses like these, and there’s not much special about these four in particular, except that they demonstrate how even the humblest dwellings have stories to tell after a century of history. These little doubles were originally identical, but they have had separate adventures. Two of the houses have had one of their upstairs windows bricked in; one of them has had the window replaced with a three-staggered-light front door, which is an amusing trick to play on houseguests. The pair on the left have had their flat porch roofs replaced with peaked roofs. All of them probably had green tile (or possibly red) on the overhangs above the upstairs windows. The main purpose of those overhangs is to serve as a signifier of the Spanish Mission style, which was very popular when these houses were built. The overhangs may also serve as a talisman to ward off the aluminum-awning salesman, and it worked in three out of four of the houses.

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

December 11, 2024
Rafferty Rows, Squirrel Hill

These two long rows of houses where Beeler Street meets Wilkins Avenue make a striking impression now, but they must have been more striking when they were built in the early 1900s. For several years they sat out in the farmlands of Squirrel Hill, forming a strange urban island (along with two rows of three houses across Beeler Street) in the midst of the otherwise rural East End. We caught them on a dim and rainy evening.

1910 fire-insurance map.

Note how the rhythm of the houses is made more interestingly varied by alternating the peaked and rounded fronts but running the oriels in a series of three.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 30, 2024
Rowhouses on Pierce Street, Shadyside

A reader named Tom Slack writes to ask about Pierce Street. “There is a street in Shadyside I’ve always been fascinated with—the block of row houses on Pierce Street—I wondered if you knew anything about the history.”

Old Pa Pitt is always happy to hear from readers, and he was ready to send this one to his article about Pierce Street, with apologies for not knowing any more than is in the article. But he could not find his article on Pierce Street. He distinctly remembered having been to Pierce Street just to photograph those houses, and the pictures turned up when he searched the vast Father Pitt archive. But here it is more than two years after those pictures were taken, and still no article!

Well, we can take care of that right now. Father Pitt regrets to say that he does not know much about these houses, but here is what he does know.

Pierce Street—formerly Parker Street—is a tiny street, two blocks long, that branches off the end of College Street. The rowhouses in the 5800 block are on listed by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation as a historic landmark, and the PHLF tells us that they were built in 1891–1892. Old maps tell us they were owned by A. W. Mellon. This teaches us the valuable lesson that every little investment helps if you want to become the richest family in the world.

From the Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, March 18, 1891: “At Baum Grove, near Roup station, Allegheny Co, about fifty dwellings will be erected by A. W. Mellon, of Pittsburg.” Roup Station was just at the west end of Parker Street. A few of the houses on the southeast side of the street have disappeared, replaced by a parking lot. But the block-long row on the northwest side is still intact.

The houses look tiny from the front, and by any standard they are small houses. Like many of these Pittsburgh terraces, though, they are deeper than you might think. Moreover, they make clever use of the space they do have, as we see in this view of the alley behind one of the rows, where projecting oriels add a few more square feet to the upper floors while still leaving room for rear exits and trash cans.

There is a little mystery about the street name. The street was called Parker Street before the houses were built, and after as well, until the great street-name rationalization after Pittsburgh absorbed the city of Allegheny, when duplicate street names were eliminated. (Renamed streets were usually given a name that began with the same letter, as happened here.) But when the houses were built, a street sign was built into the corner house identifying the street as “College Place.” Father Pitt does not know whether the street was ever renamed, or whether Mr. Mellon expected to be able to wangle a renaming for his new little development and was disappointed. The commercial building at the corner of Ellsworth Avenue and College Street was built at the same time, also on A. W. Mellon property, and it bears an identical stone block identifying College Street as “College Ave.”

Kodak EasyShare Z981.

November 19, 2024