Tag: Second Empire Architecture

  • Mystery Mansion on Perry Hilltop

    Second Empire tower through bare branches

    Walking down Perrysville Avenue one day not long ago, Father Pitt spotted a distinctive outline through the branches. It was the tower of a Second Empire mansion.

    Mansion through the trees

    Old Pa Pitt was very excited. Here was a Second Empire mansion he had not known about before. That was very interesting. He started investigating, and found that the discovery was actually much more interesting than that.

    Historians of Perry Hilltop are earnestly invited to help us out with the history of this house, which has caught old Pa Pitt’s imagination. The house is in deplorable shape—especially the side you can see through the overgrown shrubbery from Perrysville Avenue, where billows of garbage seem to be spilling out of the building.

    2421 Perrysville Avenue

    But what is fascinating is that, where old Pa Pitt expected a Second Empire mansion, he found something much older. The shallow pitch of the roof and the broad expanse of flat white board underneath the roofline say “Greek Revival” in a loud voice.

    This appears to be the side of the house, although Father Pitt has reason for believing that it was originally the front. The large modern Perrysville Plaza apartment building is next to it, but walking around to the back of that building reveals the front of the house—with its distinctive Second Empire tower.

    Front of the house
    Front elevation

    The tower is pure Second Empire, but the roof still says Greek Revival. The house must have been Second Empired, probably in the 1880s. The attic windows in the gable ends were added then: they match the ones in the tower.

    Gable with attic windows
    Tower with matching windows
    Tower

    The Second Empire remodeling was not the last big change. You may have noticed that there is something a little off about the brick walls. This appears to have been a frame house originally. Old plat maps show it as a frame house through 1910; later maps show it as brick. A brick veneer must have been added at some time around the First World War. The new brick walls swallowed all the window frames and other trim that would have given us more clues about the original date.

    There was a house here belonging to the “Boyle Heirs” in 1872, the earliest plat map we have found. An 1882 map shows a carriage drive leading to the plank road that became Perrysville Avenue, with a circle at the end of the house near the road—bolstering old Pa Pitt’s guess that the end was originally the front.

    There are few Second Empire mansions remaining in Pittsburgh, and even fewer Greek Revival ones. This house ought to be preserved, but it probably will not be. The neighborhood is neglected enough that it has not even been condemned yet, which means that it will continue to decay until either it becomes an intolerable nuisance or the land becomes valuable enough to build something else on. Father Pitt will label it Critically Endangered.

    All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists, and Father Pitt has done the best he can do without trespassing.

    Tower
    Front of the mansion
    Bay
    Gable
    Perspective View of the House
    Bay, balcony, and porch
    Tower
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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

    131 Shiloh Street

    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.

    Gordo’s
    200 Shiloh Street

    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.

    203 Shiloh Street
    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.


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  • A Backstreet Corner of the South Side in the Snow

    Corner of Sidney Street and South 19th Street

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


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  • A Walk on North Avenue in Manchester

    1337 and 1339 West North Avenue

    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.

    1334
    Many more pictures…
  • Second Empire Row on North Avenue in Manchester

    1301–1315 West North Avenue, Manchester, Pittsburgh

    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.

    1311 West North Avenue
    1301 and 1303

    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.

    1301 and 1303
    Transom of No. 1311
    1301 and 1303
    1311 and 1313
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100;

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


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  • Some Commercial Buildings on Fifth Avenue, Coraopolis

    934 Fifth Avenue

    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.

    934 Fifth Avenue
    934 Fifth Avenue from the side
    940 Fifth Avenue

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

    938 Fifth Avenue
    942 and 944 Fifth Avenue
    1014 and 1016 Fifth Avenue
    1014 and 1016 Fifth Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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  • Queen Anne Meets Second Empire in Manchester

    1223 and 1225 West North Avenue

    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.

    1223 West North Avenue, decorated porch gable
    1223, porch woodwork
    1223, porch pillars
    1225, terra cotta
    1223, turret
    1223 and 1225 West North Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150IS; Nikon COOPLPIX P100; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

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

    Negley-Gwinner-Harter House

    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.

    Negley-Gwinner-Harter House
    Negley-Gwinner-Harter House
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

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  • A Walk on Arlington Avenue in Arlington

    2208 Arlington Avenue

    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.

    2208–2204 Arlington Avenue

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

    2214 Arlington Avenue
    Date stone with date 1909
    2214 Arlington Avenue
    2300 Arlington Avenue

    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.

    2310 Arlington Avenue
    2310 Arlington Avenue
    2311 Arlington Avenue
    2311 Arlington Avenue
    2325 and 2329

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

    2331–2335

    These buildings are all skewed.

    2332
    2332
    2335
    2338

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

    2338

    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.

    2338–2332
    2400

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

    2400
    2401–2405

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

    2401–2405
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.

    More pictures of Arlington Avenue.

  • Hillman House, Shadyside

    Hillman House

    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.

    Hillman House plaque on gatepost
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.