Father Pitt

Tag: Rowhouses

The Kleber Row Newly Built, Brighton Heights

Back in October we featured a row of houses designed by T. E. Cornelius on Davis Avenue in Brighton Heights. Thanks to an alert correspondent, here is that same row from the Pittsburgh Daily Post of March 5, 1916, with a caption describing the decidedly modern effect of the style:

The illustration shows one row of a building operation comprising four rows on Davis avenue, Northside, erected for Henry Kleber by T. Ed. Cornelius, architect. The low raking roofs and heavy square columns give a “Craftsman” effect, and the interior is carried out in a similar style. This method of building three or six houses under one roof shows a handsome return on the money invested.

Thirteen of these houses were built on the Kleber property. The houses still stand today, and in very good shape.

The architect and his clients obviously considered this design a success: T. E. Cornelius duplicated it at other sites in the city. It is a backhanded compliment to Mr. Cornelius that some architectural historians have misattributed a group of them in Shadyside to the noted progressive architect Frederick Scheibler. We might pay another compliment to Mr. Cornelius by noting that, everywhere these houses appear, they are in better shape than most of Frederick Scheibler’s rowhouses of similar size and era. These houses were built cheap, but they were built to last.

February 10, 2024
McIntosh Row, Allegheny West

This row of houses is not architecturally spectacular, but it represents something important in the history of Pittsburgh. Originally built in 1865, it was restored in the 1970s by a neighborhood association. Allegheny West set an example of cooperative preservation that has made the neighborhood the attractive place to live it is today, and other neighborhoods took note.

Originally there were six of these houses. They had all decayed badly, but it was the demolition of the two on the end that provoked the Allegheny West Civic Council to act. It was one of the turning points in Pittsburgh history. Would the city become a sea of parking lots surrounding a few big attractions, or would we find clever ways to keep some of the good things we had?

You can read the history of Allegheny West’s successes and failures on the Recent History of Allegheny West page at the Allegheny West site. The story of the McIntosh Row is in Part 5; the site design is too clever by half, so it is not possible to link to that part directly.

February 5, 2024
St. James Terrace, Shadyside

The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historic marker at the entrance tells us all Father Pitt knows about St. James Terrace: that it was built in 1915, and that the builder was John E. Born. Perhaps we will discover the architect one of these days.

St. James Terrace is an enclave within an enclave: it branches off the narrow dead-end St. James Place, but with no access for vehicles. Instead, the houses are arranged around a narrow but beautiful garden court, which looks very romantic in the snow.

January 27, 2024
Italianate Houses in Allegheny West

This pair of houses is obscured by trees all through the leafy months, but in the winter we can appreciate the simple but tasteful Italianate details.

The difference in bricks suggests that the third floor was added later, but still early enough that the Italianate details were matched exactly.

January 20, 2024
Row of Houses by Carpenter & Crocker, Homewood

This picture was taken a year and a half ago, but it seems it got lost in the press of events, and Father Pitt never published it here. He went looking for it because he had just found the architects: research by the grandson of William Carpenter indicates that these houses on Kelly Street at Collier Street were designed by Carpenter & Crocker in about 1901. They were originally part of a larger group of 24 dwellings, but two other rows—one on Collier Street, the cross street, and one on the alley behind, Fleury Way—have vanished. The building on the corner was probably part of the original row; at any rate, it was in place by 1910, when a fire-insurance map shows a three-storey building here at the end of a row of two-storey buildings. It looks to old Pa Pitt like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense: that is, a bar with rooms above to make it eligible for a “hotel” liquor license.

Two years later, Carpenter & Crocker would design St. James Episcopal Church, now the Church of the Holy Cross, just across Collier Street from these houses. Was the developer a member of the St. James congregation?

January 9, 2024
Graham–Teufel House, Allegheny West

This house has an unusual history, which we take from Carol Peterson’s detailed research at the Allegheny West site. It was built in the early 1860s as a typical modest Pittsburgh rowhouse. In 1918, new owners decided they wanted something less embarrassingly old-fashioned, so they hired the most modern and up-to-date architects—Kiehnel & Elliott—to remodel the house in the most modern and up-to-date style—Spanish Mission. The result is something that would have been right at home in Florida, where Kiehnel and Elliott were beginning a flourishing practice that would persuade them to move to Miami in 1922. It would also have matched the neighborhood aesthetic in many of the new Pittsburgh streetcar suburbs like Carrick or Beechview. It seems a little out of place on Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West.

January 8, 2024
The Mystery of the Converted Church on the South Side

Update: The mystery is solved, thanks to an alert reader who has earned old Pa Pitt’s gratitude. This was the Second Methodist Church of East Birmingham, opened in 1872 and sold at a sheriff’s sale in 1874. There must be an interesting story in the short period between those two dates; usually being a Methodist wasn’t such a risky business.

The original text of the article is below.

If anyone knows the history of this building on Larkins Way at 23rd Street, Father Pitt would be happy to hear it. That it was a church at one point is obvious. It fits the pattern of small Pittsburgh churches of the middle and late nineteenth century exactly, and those blocked-in Gothic windows on the end would tell the story if nothing else did. But it was not a church for long before it was converted to four tiny alley houses. It appears without a label as a single undivided building on an 1882 map at the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, but not in 1872, so it was probably built at some time in the 1870s. By 1890 it is already shown as divided into four parts, probably rental houses, since they were all owned by Jane Morgan. It continued under single ownership through 1923, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt knows about it.

So what kind of congregation failed in less than twenty years’ time? It is an interesting mystery, and Father Pitt has not yet solved it.

December 17, 2023
Garber Row, Morningside

The Vilsack Row in Morningside, designed by Frederick Scheibler, is famous as one of the early experiments with modernism in residential design. Here we have another approach to more or less the same problem: how to make compact and affordable housing that is nevertheless architecturally interesting and therefore attractive to potential residents. These houses were built in 1914 at almost exactly the same time as the Vilsack Row and diagonally across the street from it, but they could hardly be more different.

The architect here was A. B. Snyder, not one of our most famous architects, but one who could be relied upon to produce an attractive design. In this row for Mrs. Josephine A. Garber, Snyder has taken an approach exactly opposite to Scheibler’s: he has created a Tudor fantasy that makes the row feel like an English village. That fantasy cost money, and these were larger and more expensive houses than the ones in the Vilsack Row. But they were still reasonably cheap. They were another successful answer to the same question.

December 5, 2023
Vilsack Row, Morningside

Rows of terrace houses became quite common in Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, and they all shared the same basic plan: roofed front porches in front of narrow but deep units with shared walls, reducing the expense of each unit. Within that formula, though, there is room for quite a bit of variation. The problem is how to make them attractive even though they are cheap. Because they are on the same street in Morningside, and almost across from each other, we are going to look at two groups today that picked radically different approaches to the problem. In this article, we have by far the better-known of the two: the Vilsack Row by Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr.

The houses have all been altered in various ways; we can be grateful that they have survived at all. They were certainly the most extraordinary stab at modernism in Pittsburgh, and possibly in the United States, when they were built in 1914. The least mutilated of the row are still startling in their starkly abstract forms.

Even the ones that have been most altered stand out as like nothing else in Pittsburgh before World War II, let alone before World War I. The alterations have all been retreats from modernism. The porch roofs originally were supported by single columns in the center, so that they seemed to float in space; the porches, entrances, and windows seemed to be holes cut in a continuous flat plane.

The houses are called the Vilsack Row, incidentally, because they were an investment by Leopold Vilsack, one of the owners of Iron City Brewing, who rests in St. Mary’s Cemetery in a mausoleum of quite a different style.

Radical modernism was certainly not the only solution to the problem of rowhouse design. At about the same time these houses were going up, the Garber row was being built on the same street, and it took almost the opposite approach.

December 5, 2023
Second Empire Houses on 13th Street, South Side

On a street of mostly small vernacular rowhouses, this pair of grand Second Empire houses dominates the streetscape. They are well preserved and well cared for, and we need no more excuse to appreciate the details.

This front entrance (could you guess that the picture was taken the day after Halloween?) bears an unusual memento of the original owner of the house:

Note the monogram on the side of the steps. An 1890 map shows that the house belonged to a Jonathan Seibert.

Note the exceptionally elaborate door on the breezeway.

November 10, 2023