Five houses on Parkman Avenue, and once again we take our attributions with gratitude from the anonymous Google Maps user who built a map of Architects of Schenley Farms Residences. The one above was designed by Louis Stevens and built in 1910.
Designed by D. Simpson & Co. and built in 1915.
Designed by Louis Stevens and built in 1915.
Designed by Maximilian Nirdlinger and built in 1911.
Designed by Maximilian Nirdlinger and built in 1911.
More Schenley Farms houses in the snow (many with bonus icicles), beginning with this 1909 house, designed by Vrydaugh & Wolfe.
We have not yet found an architect for this lavish Tudor house, built in 1906.
Another one whose architect we don’t know yet, also built in 1906.
A free interpretation of Colonial by Alden & Harlow, built in 1921.
Designed by Louis Stevens and built in 1911.
Designed by Benno Janssen and built in 1912.
Designed by Simpson & Schmeltz and built in 1909.
Designed by Rutan & Russell and built in 1909.
Designed by C. E. Mueller and built in 1908.
Designed by Simpson & Isles and built in 1914.
The Junior Order of United American Mechanics is a fraternal order that was originally the young people’s division of the Order of United American Mechanics. Since it has its own Wikipedia article, old Pa Pitt will send you there for information about the order. For this building, however, he is happy to be your source of information. It was built to be the national headquarters of the organization, which had previously been in the Wabash Building downtown. “The new five-story building of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics at Forbes and Halket sts., was completed last June at a cost of about $350,000, exclusive of the site. The national headquarters of the order, which formerly were in the Wabash building, occupy the entire fourth and fifth floors of the new building, while the lower floors are given over to offices and store rooms.” (Pittsburgh Press, Monday, January 4, 1926.) This building was designed by Louis Stevens, best known for elegant homes for the well-to-do, but also the designer of all the public buildings in the borough of Overbrook (now part of the city of Pittsburgh).
The cornerstone was laid in 1924, but the building was completed in 1925.
It will come as no surprise that the building now belongs to the University of Pittsburgh.
This was an early commission for Louis Stevens,1 who would be best known in his career for houses and mansions for the rich and the upper middle class. It was built in 1911 on Churchview Avenue (then called Church Avenue, but renamed Churchview when Carrick was taken into the city of Pittsburgh), just off Brownsville Road. Four years earlier, Stevens had been studying architecture in Carnegie Tech’s night school. The front of the building has been muddled a bit, but the renovations were done in a halfhearted manner that allows us to appreciate the original composition.
Overbrook was one of the last boroughs to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh. In 1929, when it was still independent, it built this fine all-in-one municipal building from a design by architect Louis Stevens, who is best remembered for houses for the rich and the upper middle class but also designed most of the public buildings for the borough of Overbrook. As far as old Pa Pitt knows, the building still belongs to the city of Pittsburgh, which has used it for various purposes over the years. It has been sensitively renovated and seems to have a secure future.
In seventeen and a half years of articles, this is the first time old Pa Pitt has published one about Overbrook. It just goes to show how much more there is to do. Even another seventeen and a half years will not come near to finishing the job, so Father Pitt will just have to keep working.
Louis Stevens was best known as a designer of romantic châteaux and French cottages for the well-to-do, but if you asked him for a Renaissance palace, he was up to the task. The Harry J. Parker house was built in 1915 on a prominent corner where Bayard Street meets Bigelow Boulevard, and it is a standout in a neighborhood of splendid houses.
As we mentioned before, we are attempting to photograph every house in the residential part of Schenley Farms. Here is a big album of houses on Bigelow Boulevard, which becomes a residential street as it winds through the neighborhood. Above, Ledge House, the strikingly different home of A. A. Hamerschlag, the first director of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was designed by Henry Hornbostel, who designed the Carnegie Tech campus and taught at Carnegie Tech. It has recently been cleaned of a century’s worth of industrial soot and restored to its original appearance.
Above and below, the D. Herbert Hostetter, Jr., house, architects Janssen and Abbott. Benno Janssen and his partner abstracted the salient details of the Tudor or “English half-timber” style and reduced it to the essentials, creating a richly Tudory design with no wasted lines.
Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.
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Louis Stevens designed two houses side by side on Parkman Street for two members of the Terry family—Henry Terry and C. D. Terry. The houses were built about 19161, and they are a good demonstration of how completely different arrangements of the elements can nevertheless be stamped with the architect’s indelible signature.
The Henry Terry house, above, is symmetrical, with twin gables facing us and a porch roof extending from the center entrance.
The C. D. Terry house, on the other hand, is asymmetrical, with a side porch, an entrance with Romanesque-style receding arches, and a single gable facing the street.
In both houses, though, we see the same steeply pitched roof, with its slightly flared roofline, and the same Flemish-bond brickwork. The houses let us know right away that they are the work of the same architect.
Stevens’ best-known work in Pittsburgh is probably the Worthington mansion in Squirrel Hill, which is now part of Temple Sinai. It is on a much larger scale and made with richer materials, but we can see its family resemblance to these two houses.
