Father Pitt

Tag: Second Empire Architecture

Three Buildings from the 1880s on Shiloh Street, Mount Washington

Some day some clever inventor will patent a way to match mortar colors in brickwork and make a fortune. (That was sarcasm, by the way: it can be done, but first you have to realize that it ought to be done.) Nevertheless, this building looks much better than it did a few years ago, when the front was covered with aluminum, fake stone, and asphalt shingles. Was it absolutely necessary to brick in all the side windows? Well, probably. Otherwise light might leak in. The original building comes from the 1880s, and the basic outline of it remains Victorian Gothic.

This building also seems to have been put up in the 1880s, or possibly as early as the 1870s. It has been so thoroughly remodeled so often that it would be hard to guess what it looked like originally; Father Pitt’s best guess would be that it had a Second Empire mansard roof and details, replaced in the 1970s by the parody of a Second Empire roof we see today. In the past two decades, the ground floor has been completely redesigned twice; the current incarnation is better than the way it looked twenty years ago.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

Here is a Second Empire building that retains much of its original detail, in spite of the complete remodeling of the ground floor (the original design probably let in far too much natural light) and the artificial siding on the dormers.

Comments

March 28, 2025
A Backstreet Corner of the South Side in the Snow

The corner of Sidney Street and South 19th Street, where we find a Second Empire building with a beautifully kept storefront.

Comments

February 17, 2025
A Walk on North Avenue in Manchester

A few weeks ago old Pa Pitt took a wintry walk on North Avenue (which used to be Fayette Street back when it did not run all the way through to North Avenue on the rest of the North Side). He took piles of pictures, and although he published four articles so far from that walk (one, two, three, four), there’s still quite a collection backed up waiting to be published. Thus this very long article, which is a smorgasbord of Victorian domestic architecture with a few other eras thrown in. Above, a pair of Italianate houses. They both preserve the tall windows typical of the high Italianate style; the one on the right still has (or has restored) its two-over-two panes.

Many more pictures…

February 15, 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
Some Commercial Buildings on Fifth Avenue, Coraopolis

A few of the commercial buildings on Fifth Avenue, the mainest of the main streets in Coraopolis. We begin with a curious building that reveals its secret as we move along the street: it is a Second Empire building from the late 1800s with a later commercial front added.

An interesting roofline and a bit of Art Nouveau terra-cotta decoration enliven this little storefront.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Comments

January 14, 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
A Late Holiday Feature: Negley-Gwinner-Harter House, Shadyside

Old Pa Pitt had meant to publish these pictures a little before Christmas, but he lost track of them. And since he doesn’t want to wait till next year, here they are now. This is the Negley-Gwinner-Harter House in Shadyside, with a crew installing its Christmas ribbon. This was the house that sat derelict for years after a disastrous fire, so it is always a cheerful sight when Father Pitt walks past and sees it in fine shape like this. But it is even more cheerful all tied up in a Christmas bow.

Kodak EasyShare Z981.

Comments

January 10, 2025
A Walk on Arlington Avenue in Arlington

Arlington Avenue is the business spine of the Arlington neighborhood, although not much business is left. Still, things are picking up, and there are more businesses now than there were a couple of years ago. The buildings on the street share certain similarities in style, but the thing a visitor will notice first is that very few of them are rectangles. Most of them are parallelograms or trapezoids. In these pictures, when you see buildings where the walls do not seem to meet at right angles, that is not because of distorted perspective from a wide-angle or telephoto lens. It is because the walls do not meet at right angles, as we see in this building, with an acute angle on the corner. Note also the cheaper red brick on the side wall, with the expensive Kittanning brick used only on the front.

Arlington Avenue is also a gourmet feast for lovers of utility cables.

The building above is the only one of the storefronts for which old Pa Pitt has an architect’s name: Edward Goldbach, who lived just down the hill from the building. It is quite possible that we will eventually find Mr. Goldbach’s name attached to several other buildings on the street: many of them share similar design principles and a similar taste for yellow Kittanning brick.

The little frame store at left is yet another skewed parallelogram.

These buildings are all skewed.

This Second Empire building was actually rectangular, but the modern storefront addition filled out the lot and made an acute angle.

These cellular masts probably make a large contribution to the economy of the Arlington Avenue business district. And here is our most artistic arrangement of utility cables yet.

This Second Empire building, on the other hand, took full advantage of the whole lot, leaving it with an obtuse angle at the corner.

These buildings are skewed in different ways, just to make sure the streetscape is never boring.

Nikon COOLPIX P100; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.

More pictures of Arlington Avenue.

December 21, 2024
Hillman House, Shadyside

Here is another architectural mystery solved by recognizing a Second Empire mansion under a radical exterior alteration. We saw such a house made into an apartment building in Highland Park; here, the transformation has been managed with much more elegance. “Pittsburgh House Histories” on Facebook explains that this was originally the home of James Rees, a builder of riverboats and steam-powered industrial engines, built in the fashionable Second Empire style with a central tower much like the one at Baywood. In 1919, the house was bought by John H. Hillman, Jr., and by that time the Second Empire style was already a mortal embarrassment. Mr. Hillman hired the architect Edward P. Mellon, who prospered through his connections to rich Mellon relatives, to remodel the house. Mellon’s taste was staidly classical, but within that taste he could manage some very attractive effects. He amputated the top of the tower and refaced the house with stone, adding Renaissance trimmings. The result was a house that looked almost new and quite up to date for 1919.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

November 16, 2024
Second Empire, Meet Spanish Mission

This odd-looking apartment building on Stanton Avenue in Highland Park makes some sense once we peel apart its history. At first old Pa Pitt didn’t know what to make of it, but looking on old plat maps made him realize that the central section was a grand house in the Second Empire style, probably built in the 1870s.

In your imagination, take away those sunrooms on the first and second floors. Add a front porch the width of the house. You might put a Second Empire mansard cupola on the central tower. The result would be a lot like this:

This is Baywood, the Alexander King mansion at the other end of Highland Park (pictures here and here). The house at the core of this apartment building probably looked much like Baywood when it was new. It seems to appear first on the 1882 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps, where the property owner is not identified. In 1890 it is shown as belonging to A. Dempster, and it still belonged to A. Dempster in 1910, with its original outlines. In 1923 it has its current shape, and the owner is shown as G. West.

At some time around World War I, then, when several of the houses on Stanton Avenue were being converted to apartments, someone bought the Dempster mansion and decided to expand it into an apartment building. But the Second Empire style was embarrassingly passé. The new wings were done in an up-to-the-minute Spanish Mission style, and the original house was coated with stucco and modified as much as practical to go with the new style. Nothing, however, could disguise the outline of a Second Empire mansion. Thus today we have a clash of styles that is probably more interesting, visually speaking, that a new apartment house in pure Mission style would have been.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 14, 2024