These two identical fantasy-Tudor apartment buildings at the corner of Morrowfield and Shady Avenues were built in 1929. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but they are very similar to apartment buildings built at the same time in Mount Lebanon and associated with Charles Geisler. Since Geisler worked on other buildings in Squirrel Hill, he is a likely candidate.
We have the technology to take those utility cables out of the picture, but in this case not the patience.
Gladys Avenue was one of the richest streets in the middle-class neighborhood of Beechview. We’ve already seen a bungalow designed by the notable Pittsburgh architect W. Ward Williams. Here are a few more houses nearby, beginning with another designed by Williams, this one a generously sized Tudor—or English-style, as it would have been called in 1914, when it was built.
They’re nearly obscured by shrubbery, but note the very interesting sloped porch supports of this house that echo the curving slope of the roof.
A generously extra-large foursquare. Have you noticed that these first three houses all have unusual diamond panes in the upper sashes of some of their windows? Those were also a feature of the bungalow designed by W. Ward Williams on the same street, making us wonder whether Williams was responsible for all these houses.
Father Pitt had a nice conversation with the owner of this house, who tells us that it was built in about 1919. If you peer into the shadows behind the flag in the picture above, you may notice an exceptionally fine art-glass window in the parlor.
The Bayard Street face of Bayard Manor. Yes, that odd little half-timbered projection on the roof really is skewed in relation to this side of the building. That is because Craig Street and Bayard Street do not meet at exactly a right angle; the roof projection (it probably holds elevator mechanics) is oriented at right angles to every side of the building except the Bayard Street front.
More pictures of the Bayard Street front of Bayard Manor, the main entrance, and the Craig Street side.
Some houses on Heberton Street in a variety of styles, from Shingle Style to Pennsylvania Farmhouse Revival.
Henry Gilchrist designed many fashionable mansions for the rich and the upper middle classes. This 1904 Tudor house on Callowhill Street is typical of the “English style” of the time, but the details of the half-timbering are unusually rich. The house is very similar, but not identical, to one Gilchrist designed two years later in Schenley Farms. In this house, though, the small-paned Tudor windows have been preserved, and they add to the picturesque old-English effect.1
This HDR picture of the house, made up of three different exposures, looks a bit artificial but brings out the details in the woodwork.
This fairy-tale palace, finished in 1930 or 1931, was designed by Paul Scheuneman, whom old Pa Pitt has already pointed out as a skilled practitioner of what we call the fairy-tale style—see these two houses in Green Tree. This one was featured in the Sun-Telly on Washington’s Birthday in 1931:
“English Design—Caste Brothers, builders, have recently completed this home in Cedarhurst Manor, new residential park on the outskirts of Mt. Lebanon. The architect was Paul R. Scheuneman. Several more homes are being planned.”
Some Tudor houses (or “English,” as they were usually called) stick just enough timbers in the stucco to get the message across that this is supposed to be Merrie England. This one is a bravura performance in woodwork. The 1910 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps shows it as owned by A. R. D. Gillespie, who was probably the original owner.
The Manor, which opened in 1922, was designed by Harry S. Bair, who did a number of theaters around here (including the Regent, now the Kelly-Strayhorn in East Liberty). As the caption says, it was “a distinct departure from the conventional,” and the Tudor half-timbering of the exterior advertised the sumptuous club-like atmosphere of the interior. Today the exterior has been simplified, and the building expanded, but it still feels like an outpost of Merrie England on Murray Avenue.
This gable on the Darlington Road side of the building still preserves all its intricate diagonal brickwork and half-timbering.
These little chimneys should have their own separate landmark status.
Almost nothing remains of the original interior, though the Manor is still a movie house, now divided into four small theaters. Originally, the lobby was a feast of luxurious furniture and decoration.
And that was just the entrance lobby. If you were meeting someone or just waiting for something, you could retire to the parlor:
There was also a men’s club room with the atmosphere of an old English manor:
After all that, movies seem almost superfluous, but the auditorium was just as luxurious as the rest of the building:
Old Pa Pitt particularly likes the arrangement of tropical plants in the orchestra pit.
Today, although the Manor is still a very pleasant place to take in a movie, almost nothing is left of that sumptuous interior except a bit of ceiling and this fine chandelier:
The 1922 pictures all came from a two-page feature in Moving Picture World for August 5, 1922, and we reprint the text of the article here (making a few silent typographic corrections).
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Willis McCook was a lawyer to the robber barons, which earned him a baronial mansion among them on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row.
For his daughter and her husband, he hired the same architects, Carpenter & Crocker, to design this neat little Tudor cottage around the corner on the Amberson Avenue side of his property. We can see how the architects cleverly linked the two houses by making the central peak of the smaller house echo the prickly gables of the larger one.
North Hills Estates is a suburban plan in Ross Township just north of West View. It was laid out in 1929, and most of the central part was built up in the 1930s—a period when, surprisingly enough, there was quite a bit of house construction going on in the suburbs. For those who had money, it was considered more economical during the Depression to build a new house, what with the low cost of labor and materials, than to buy an existing one. Thousands of houses sat empty, repossessed by lenders, but meanwhile new suburbs like North Hills Estates filled up with beautiful homes.
This is another article for people who like to scroll through dozens of house designs and marvel at the variety of styles, and at the high quality of almost all the designs.
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