Father Pitt

Tag: Rowhouses

  • Meado’cots, Homewood

    Meado’cots

    Designed by our remarkable early modernist Frederick Scheibler, “Meado’cots” is an unusual set of terrace houses built in 1914—another Scheibler answer to the question of how to make cheap rows of houses architecturally attractive. It sat abandoned and boarded up for quite a while, but now it is inhabited and stable. The metal roofs on the central section and the cheap standard doors are not to old Pa Pitt’s taste, but they were within the budget of the new owner, and they keep the buildings standing and in good shape, with the potential for restoration with original materials later.

    Composite of the central section

    This composite of the central section from above parked-car level is made possible by a kind neighbor from across the street. He saw us struggling to hold the camera up at arm’s length and called down from a third-floor window to offer the use of his stairs for a better angle. Thank you, Homewood neighbor, for confirming Father Pitt’s impression that Homewood is a place where the neighborly virtues are strong.

    Meado’cots, end house
    Corner window

    Note the corner windows. They would become a badge of modernism in the 1940s, but here they are in 1912!

    Meado’cots
    Meado’cots
    Meado’cots

  • Victorian Row in Lawrenceville

    247–253 Fist Street

    Separate ownership does funny things to rowhouses. This row of four would have matched originally; some owners have doubled down on the Victorian style, and some have done what they could with modern materials, leading to interesting effects along the property line.

    A porch pediment divided
    247 Fisk Street
    247–253 Fisk Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Textures of the South Side

    Houses on Sidney Street

    A street of Georgian rowhouses, all in identical red brick, is a beautiful sight. But there is something jazzy and invigorating about the endless variety of textures in the back streets of the South Side, even if individually some of the artificial sidings people applied to their houses in the twentieth century were never very attractive. The textures are probably best appreciated in black and white, so old Pa Pitt stuck some monochromatic film in his Retinette and went for a walk around the block.

    Houses on 17th Street
    1615 Mingham Street
    Houses on 18th Street
    Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film.

  • Houses on 24th Street, South Side

    Houses on 24th Street

    A row of houses in different styles, all of them typical of the South Side.

    117 and 118 South 24th Street

    We’ve seen these two tiny frame houses before. They date from the Civil War era, and unlike almost all the others of their type and age on the South Side they retain their wood siding. The one on the left is an odd shape: there is a kink in the South Side street grid at 24th street, so the alley does not meet the street at a right angle.

    121 South 24th Street
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    This eclectic Victorian has a large dormer on the fourth floor, and another thing that is sort of a dormer, but not exactly, projecting from the roof and lining up with a slightly extended section, giving the house the effect of a three-storey tower.

  • Moderne Terrace in West Park

    610–614 Woodward Avenue

    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.

    Geometric patterns in the bricks
    Porch and doors
    Moderne terrace
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • The Patterned Bricks of West Park

    819 Broadway Avenue, West Park

    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.

    819 Broadway Avenue
    Engemann’s Building
    733 Broadway
    733 Broadway Avenue

    Father Pitt was taken with this distinctive corner entrance.

    704 Broadway Avenue
    813 Broadway Avenue
    813 Broadway Avenue
    817 Broadway Avenue
    406–410 Broadway Avenue
    406 Broadway Avenue
    902–908 Broadway Avenue
    1128–1132 Dohrman Street

    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.

    1128–1132 Dohrman Street

    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.

    Star of David

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

  • Arts-and-Crafts Terrace in Squirrel Hill

    Terrace on Denniston Street

    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.

    Two houses in the tarrace

    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.

    Looking up at the houses
    Along the row
    Sony Alpha 3000.

  • Row of Houses, South Side Slopes

    2018–2026 South 18th Street
    Composite of two photographs from a Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    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 on Galveston Avenue, Allegheny West

    1011–1021 Galveston Avenue

    Two rows of houses, both in the Italianate style, but at different scales.

    1009 and 1011 Galveston Avenue

    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.

    1105–1011 Galveston Avenue
    1011 Galveston Avenue
    1013–1021 Galveston Avenue

    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.

    1021 Galveston Avenue
    Front door
    Sony Alpha 3000

  • Columbus Avenue, Manchester

    1305 and 1307 Columbus Avenue, Manchester

    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.

    Front door
    Window decoration

    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.

    1313 Columbus Avenue

    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.)

    1315
    Dormer
    1321
    1323
    1327
    1327
    1329
    1403
    Dormer
    1405
    1409

    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.

    1409
    1411

    We find some of the houses in better shape as we approach the western end of the street.

    1411
    1413
    1413
    1415 and 1417
    1415 and 1417
    1419 and 1421
    1421, front door
    1421, woodwork