A double house that presents the appearance of a single Second Empire mansion. French architects of the Second Empire might have turned up their Gallic snoots at the crust of lavish details, but those details are carefully balanced and create a pleasing composition, even if they are gaudy in a cheerfully Victorian way.
Father Pitt would not hesitate to affirm that this is one of the finest blocks of Second Empire houses in North America. Manchester has had its difficulties, but it has some outstanding streetscapes to show us.
On a recent visit to Indiana (Pennsylvania), a city on the periphery of the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area, old Pa Pitt was both disappointed and delighted to find the old Indiana County Courthouse shrouded in scaffolding—disappointed because it meant he could not get a clear picture of the building, but delighted because it meant that the building is getting the loving care it deserves. It was finished in 1870; the architect was James W. Drum, who designed several other prominent buildings in Indiana. The gilded cupola is the distinctive feature of the Indiana skyline, and the clock keeps the correct time.
Take away the balconies, add a mansard top to the central tower, and you would have a classic Second Empire mansion. The house may have been built in the 1870s; as far back as 1882, according to old maps, it belonged to Joseph Kountz, who was still the owner in 1910. By 1923 it belonged to “R. Wolfinger et al.,” suggesting that the house had been turned into apartments by then.
The maps show that the front was not always as symmetrical as it is now; and if you look at the front closely, you will notice that the bays behind the balconies on the first two floors on the left side are original, but the square ones on the right side, and the third-floor bay on the left side, are built from a different shade of brick.
Much of the ornamental woodwork from the original 150-year-old house has been preserved.
Linden Avenue in Point Breeze filled up fairly slowly from the 1880s on, and it has always been a desirable neighborhood, so it is a museum of good domestic architecture from many different eras. The wide variety of houses makes it a very pleasant street for an afternoon stroll. We have already seen the Frank Alden house and the Joseph Langfitt mansion; here are some more Linden Avenue houses from the 1880s to the 1930s.
It’s a little hard to date this house from its appearance; it seems to be a late example of the Second Empire style. The corner was probably a small storefront or professional office.
The house has been going through some considerable renovation, but so far the exceptionally fine front door with leaded glass all around has been left intact. We hope it can be restored and not replaced.
The porch may also pose some problems; the columns and the brick pillars that support them need work, and it may be cheaper to replace them. We hope they can stay.
These two very similar buildings are some of the most splendid Second Empire architecture in Pittsburgh. The Second Empire style is so called from its popularity during the Second French Empire: that is, the reign of Napoleon III. The most distinguishing mark of the style is the mansard roof, which supposedly became popular in Paris because buildings were taxed by the number of floors, but the attic didn’t count as a floor—thus you could have a floor’s worth of free space under a mansard roof. In its other details, the Second Empire style is a species of Renaissance revival closely related to the Italianate style that overlapped it in fashion.
The Alla Famiglia restaurant was one of the pioneers in the ongoing revitalization of Allentown, and its owners have spiffed up this building beautifully. They have also expanded into the old movie theater next door.
The dense Highland Avenue business district in Shadyside spilled across the tracks from East Liberty in the 1920s. Before that, the area was a residential section that began to build up in the 1870s. And if you peer behind the storefronts, you can see that much of that residential section is still there behind a crust of commercial development. For example, the building above looks like a typical 1920s store-and-apartments building from the front, but from this angle we can see that it’s an addition to a large double house built in the Second Empire style in the 1870s.
This house had its ground floor turned into a store without extreme alterations to the rest of the building.
This Second Empire house, built in the 1880s, has a magnetic attraction for architectural debris.
The business strip along Walnut Street developed fairly late in the history of Shadyside; much of it was still residential a century ago. If we raise our eyes above ground-floor level, we can see that these little shops are built around a much older house, dating from the 1880s to judge by old maps.
A few blocks eastward on Walnut Street we find a different kind of conversion.
Here is a Second Empire mansion, built in the 1870s, converted to an apartment building, probably in the 1920s. The stucco addition on the front, with its cartoonish half-timbering that looks like a ten-year-old’s idea of Tudor architecture, fits better than it deserves to with the original house thanks to the simple expedient of painting everything white and matching the trim color.
