Some houses on Heberton Street in a variety of styles, from Shingle Style to Pennsylvania Farmhouse Revival.
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Some Houses on Heberton Street, Highland Park
Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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A Bunch of Houses on Thomas Boulevard, North Point Breeze
A while ago, Father Pitt took a walk on Thomas Boulevard in the light rain, so don’t be surprised to see raindrops in some of these pictures. Thomas Boulevard, like McPherson Boulevard, has an eclectic mixture of housing from duplexes through Shingle-style mansions to medium-sized apartment buildings. Today we’re concentrating on the houses, some of which are magnificent. Above, a Shingle-style house with all its shingles in place.
If you ever asked yourself how much difference materials really make in the appearance of a house, compare this Shingle-style house, where the shingles have been replaced with fake siding and paste-on shutters, to the one above.
A typical Pittsburgh Renaissance palace that has turned into an apartment building.
A house with Queen Anne outlines that has been modernized with reasonably good taste.
This frame house was in deplorable condition before it was updated and made to look like a product of the twenty-first century. You can look on Google Street View to see the specific meaning old Pa Pitt assigns to “deplorable.” With an unlimited budget, Father Pitt would prefer to restore a house like this to its original design. With a limited budget, this was a good result.
This turret with house attached needs some rescuing. It has what the real-estate people call good bones, and that turret ought to be attractive to a well-off eccentric now that the neighborhood is on the upswing.
A big center-hall house that is now solar-powered.
A stony foursquare with Queen Anne details. It has lost its porch, but the third floor retains fine original woodwork and windows.
A center-hall colonial from early in the Colonial Revival, when Georgian was filtered through a late-Victorian lens.
This is a variation on the same plan as the previous house, which is right next to it; they were probably built at the same time and designed by the same hand. The porch has been replaced with a modern construction that does not quite fit, but the house looks much better with this porch than it would look with no porch at all.
This towering center-hall manse makes spectacular use of Kittanning brick in Frederick Sauer’s favorite color. The beefiness of it, along with the well-balanced selection of picturesque details, makes us think that Sauer is a good suspect for the architect.
This house grew a large balcony when it was turned into a duplex.
A big square house with typical Queen Anne details, especially the little balcony and the curved surfaces covered with shingles.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This is a typical Pittsburgh Foursquare, but with an oversized dormer that gives it a good bit of extra space on the third floor.
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A Stroll on McPherson Boulevard, North Point Breeze
North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.
We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.
A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.
A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.
Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.
An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.
A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.
A small apartment building.
A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.
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Emsworth United Presbyterian Church
In the late 1800s, frame churches with acres of shingles, like this one, went up all over the Pittsburgh area. Few have survived; most of them were later replaced by larger and more substantial buildings. Even fewer have survived with their shingles and wood siding intact. Although the congregation dissolved in 2022, this building has been taken over by a catering company that has kept it in original shape.
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The Shingle Style in Thornburg
Thornburg is a small borough in the Chartiers valley where we can find what is probably the best group of Shingle-style houses in the Pittsburgh area. There is some good evidence that most of them were designed by Edward M. Butz, an architect whose most famous work is the Western Penitentiary. The Shingle style is rare in Pittsburgh, and though the houses are in a wide variety of forms, they share certain quirks—the second floor overhanging the first, the use of masonry for the first floor and shingles above, the exaggerated eaves—that suggest the hand of one architect in the different designs.
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A Stroll Up Devonshire Street
Today we are going to take a stroll up one block of Devonshire Street; and although it will be a short stroll, it will be a long article, because almost every single house on this block is an extraordinary mansion by some distinguished architect. Old Pa Pitt regrets that he does not know which architect for most of them, but he is feeling lazy today and has decided not to spend the rest of the day researching the histories of these houses. Instead, he will simply publish these pictures, which are worth seeing both for the houses themselves and for the poetic effect of the late-autumn landscapes, and will update the article later as more information dribbles in.
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Episcopal Church of the Messiah, Sheraden
Very few Shingle-style frame Gothic churches are left in Pittsburgh with their original wood siding: they usually get covered with artificial siding that obscures all the details and character of the building. How long this rare survivor from the 1890s will last is questionable: it belongs to the Pneuma Center for Biblical Guidance now, and it is always a temptation for organizations on a small budget to solve every problem with vinyl. So far the owners have kept the place beautifully.
