Father Pitt

Tag: Rowhouses

  • South Side Slopes Houses

    House at 18th and Crosman Streets

    The acute angle of the intersection of Crosman Street with 18th Street on the South Side Slopes creates two odd-shaped lots filled with odd-shaped buildings, both of them irregular pentagons. Above, the one on the south side of Crosman is smashed up against a cliff, with a big billboard for its neighbor: South 18th Street is the old Brownsville Plank Road, and still the main route down from the South Hills neighborhoods to the South Side. Below, the house on the north corner sits at the head of a row of little Pittsburgh rowhouses, each of them altered according to the whims of decades of owners. The corner house is festooned with aluminum awnings; three of the other houses have aluminum awnings over the front doors, and two of them (the last two down the hill) are genuine Kool Vent awnings.

    Row of houses on 18th at Crosman

    These little rowhouses are a good example of the persistence of tradition in Pittsburgh vernacular architecture. They seem to have been put up in the early 1900s, with 1903 as a terminus post quem according to the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site; but they differ very little from the tiny, narrow rowhouses of the Civil War era.

  • Achille Giammartini House, Manchester

    In context on Page Street

    It looks like an ordinary Romanesque rowhouse, like hundreds of others in Pittsburgh. But as we approach it, we notice an unusually lush growth of grotesque foliage in the carved stone relief.

    Front of the house
    Grotesque foliage with dragons and faces

    You can enlarge this picture to admire the many whimsical details. According to a local historian who left a comment here a decade ago, this was the home of Achille Giammartini, the uniquely talented stonecarver whose work can still be found all over the city, especially on the North Side. The comment is worth reproducing in full:

    Much of the local stone carving as well as work across the North Side, downtown, Carnegie Mellon University, etc was done by Achille Giammartini who built the house at 1410 Page St, near Page St & Manhattan St, in Manchester (beside Allegheny West). Although this was his personal residence he used the exterior as a “billboard” for his considerable skills. —Mark

    Some years later, we received a very interesting comment from G. Blair Bauer, a lineal descendant of the sculptor, in reply to the comment from Mark:

    Thank you, Mark. He was my great grandfather and his daughter, my grandmother, told us little about him. I remember one Christmas we got delayed going to my grandmother’s for dinner in Allegheny West because they were tearing down all the old townhouses. My grandmother said that her father had carved a lot of the mantels for the living rooms. My mother was horrified and said she wished that she had known as she would have gotten a mantel for each of us 4 children. Grandma replied, “He worked with his hands; I want to forget about him.” Mother was so enraged we got up and left dinner on the table. I now have an address and will visit his house; hope there is a lot of his work visible.

    Well, the front would certainly have left a good impression of his talents. A prospective client who visited Mr. Giammartini at home would get the impression that here was a remarkable artist, and the impression would be conveyed before the client even walked in the door. Even the address has a touch of Romanesque fantasy:

    1410
    Foliage
    Grotesque foliage with dragons

  • Romanesque Duplex in Manchester

    Front view of the houses

    A pair of Romanesque houses, mostly brick but with a splendid stone front. The decorations are extraordinarily fine, and Father Pitt suspects that they were by the extraordinary Achille Giammartini, who lived a few blocks away and was responsible for much of the ornamental stonecarving on the North Side.

    Grotesque face
    Another grotesque face
    Romanesque foliage
    Frieze
    Finial
    Roof ornament
    Corner view

    Map.

  • Stair-Step Rowhouses in Oakland

    Rowhouses on Louisa Street

    Pittsburgh is full of these little two-storey rowhouses from the first half of the twentieth century. They are often more spacious than they appear, because they are much deeper than you might guess. Like every other kind of building, they have to adapt to Pittsburgh topography, so that, on a sloping street like Louisa Street in Oakland, they end up stair-stepped like this.

  • Early-20th-Century Rowhouses, Manchester

    Abdell Street rowhouses

    Update: We are happy to report that the burned-out house has been neatly restored: see new pictures here.

    An attractive row of small houses built a little before 1910. One of them has had a fire and is under sentence of condemnation; we hope it can be rescued, but it may not be worth enough to restore. It is only yards from Allegheny West, a very desirable neighborhood; but that neighborhood line is there, and these houses are technically in Manchester.

    From the back we can see how a good bit of thought was put into making these houses bright and airy while still using the small space efficiently.

    Rear of the houses

  • Rooftops of Oakland and Phipps Conservatory

    Looking across the rowhouses and apartments of central Oakland toward Phipps Conservatory. In the distance at upper left is the Park Mansions apartment building.

  • Milliken Row, Manchester

    Milliken row, Manchester

    The tall houses here probably date from the Civil War era, and they were probably built to be rental properties; they appear on our 1872 map as belonging to A. Milliken. Originally there were three pairs of houses and one single on the corner, all matching; one of the pairs has disappeared and been replaced by smaller modern rowhouses. The newer houses do a good job of matching the style of the neighborhood, but they would have done better if they had been built at the same setback from the street. As for the height, it is probably useless to quibble about that. It is old Pa Pitt’s impression that builders of any given era are very dogmatic about the proper height for a ceiling. Look at the third floor of the house on the corner, and compare it to the third floor of the house next to it: you will see at once that modern ceilings are much lower than ceilings from the 1860s, and that is simply the way it is and nothing can be done about it.

    This street is now North Avenue, but when these houses were built it was Fayette Avenue; it did not connect to North Avenue until the later twentieth century.

  • Wrights Way

    Wrights Way, 2400 block

    Two blocks of alley houses on Wrights Way, South Side.

    2400 block
    2300 block

  • Second Empire Houses on Sarah Street, South Side

    Second Empire houses

    Two Second Empire rowhouses whose upper floors are fairly well preserved. The one on the right has had some adventures on the ground floor, possibly including a storefront at some point. Note the wooden shingles on the house on the left.

  • Victorian Row on Sarah Street, South Side

    A fine block of rowhouses on the north side of Sarah Street.