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.
Some day these houses will disappear. They are typical of middle-class houses that sprouted on the Hill in the 1890s, making use of the Second Empire mansard roof to give these narrow houses two more bedrooms on the third floors. Generations of condemnation notices have been pasted on them. They would be worth restoring if they were moved to another neighborhood, and perhaps they have some hope here, now that the Hill is growing new construction and looking more hopeful. But it isn’t likely that they’ll win their race with the wrecking ball.
These two houses facing West Park on what used to be Irwin Avenue both have interestingly complex histories. The one above has a detailed history by the late Carol Peterson, so here we will only mention the things that led to its appearance today and encourage you to see the Peterson history for more details. It was built in about 1870 as an Italianate house. In 1890 Augusta and Jacob Kaufmann of the Kaufmann Brothers department store bought the house. It was given a third floor, and the whole house was made over in the Romanesque style with Queen Anne overtones.
The house next door was probably built at about the same time as its neighbor. Without the help of Carol Peterson, we can only report what we observe. It was also built in the Italianate style, and it looks as though the third floor is an addition here as well. But the addition may have been made earlier than the alterations to its neighbor, since the tall windows were done in the same Italianate style as the ones below the third floor. The round bay in front was finished off with a mansard roof, showing the influence of the Second Empire style that was popular here before Romanesque became the big fad.
As the storm clouds rolled in, old Pa Pitt was taking a walk in Mount Washington on a couple of blocks of Virginia Avenue. The neighborhood is an interesting phenomenon: it has always been comfortable but never rich (except for Grandview Avenue), so most of the houses and buildings have been kept up, and most of the renovations show the taste of ordinary working-class Pittsburghers rather than professional architects or designers.
We begin with one of the oldest businesses in the neighborhood: the Wm. Slater & Sons funeral home, which fills an odd-shaped lot that gives the building five sides or more, depending on how you count. Slaters have been on this corner since at least 1890. It is very hard to tell the age of the building, because it is really a complex of buildings that grew and evolved over decades, and each part of it has been maintained and altered to fit current needs and tastes. For example, on a 1917 plat map, the back end of the building is marked “Livery,” indicating that W. Slater had a stable there.
This building diagonally opposite from the Slaters has an obtuse angle to deal with. Its Second Empire features are still in good shape above the ground floor, and the storefront has been kept in its old-fashioned configuration of inset entrance between angled display windows.
Here is a house built in the 1880s, also in the Second Empire style, with mansard roof giving it a full third floor. The house has been kept up with various alterations that obscure its original details (the porch, for example, is probably a later addition), but it is still tidy and prosperous-looking.
It is hard to tell what this building was originally, but Father Pitt would guess it was more or less what it is now: a storefront with living quarters upstairs. The front has been altered so much, however, that it would take a more educated guesser than Father Pitt to make an accurate diagnosis.
This apartment building has also been much altered; the windows in front, for example, were probably inset balconies
The interesting Art Nouveau detailing of the brickwork reminds us of the work of Charles W. Bier, a prolific architect whose early-twentieth-century work earns him a place among our early modernists, though he turned more conservative after the Great War.
