Father Pitt

Tag: Turrets

  • Queen Anne Turrets in Shadyside

    628 and 626 Summerlea Street

    Three quite different interpretations of the Queen Anne turret on Shadyside houses. Above, a pair of faceted turrets on a double house.

    Turret of 733 South Negley Avenue

    An unusual rectangular turret preserves its original farmhouse-Gothic window and woodwork. The turret itself is set at a 45° angle to the rest of the house.

    733 South Negley Avenue
    Turret of 727 South Negley Avenue

    Finally, an octagonal domed turret on a house whose well-preserved details are worth pausing to admire. We note in passing that even the paint is, if not original, at least the dark green color typical of Pittsburgh houses of the turn of the twentieth century: you can scratch the trim of many a Pittsburgh house and find this color at the lowest level.

    727 South Negley Avenue

    An appropriate arrangement of birds on those cables could make a short musical composition.

    Front porch

    A shingly front porch that survived the epidemic of porch amputations in the 1960s and 1970s.

    Parlor window

    The parlor window has some good stained glass under the arch and, in the arch itself, a sunflower ornament for a keystone.

    Sunflower ornament
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • The Queen Anne Style in Coraopolis

    1230 State Avenue

    The “Queen Anne” style is the one people think of most often when they think of Victorian houses. It had very little to do with any queen named Anne. Its defining characteristic is a concern for variety and picturesqueness: there is always a surprise lurking around the corner of a Queen Anne house. Turrets and Dutch gables and curiously shaped dormers and fits of Renaissance detailing are favorite devices of Queen Anne architects, but there is no single thing that defines the style.

    Coraopolis has an exceptionally fine collection of Queen Anne houses, and some of them preserve exquisite details usually lost to the ravages of time. Enlarge the picture above, for example, and admire the original windows.

    1310 State Avenue

    This one has had many revisions over the years, but the irregular shape of a Queen Anne house, and the dominant turret, are still there to mark the style.

    1324 Ridge Avenue

    Here is a house that has kept many elegant details, including its slate roof and wood trim. And note the windows in the turret:

    Turret

    The glass curves to match the curve of the wall.

    Dormer

    A curious dormer with remarkable tracery in the window.

    1324 Ridge Avenue
    1324 Ridge Avenue
    1302 State Avenue

    Another house with some alterations, but they do not disguise the turret and the big rounded bay in front.

    1303 Ridge Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    This house has also been through some alterations: the porch might have wrapped all the way around to include both doors, and the vertical siding on the second-floor oriel doubtless replaced wood shingles. The shingles are still there on the third-floor gables, however.

  • German Victorian on the South Side Slopes

    2500 South 18th Street

    This has the look of a “hotel” in the Pittsburgh sense: a bar with rooms upstairs, thus qualifying for the much more readily available hotel liquor license. It still has a bar on the ground floor. The style is what old Pa Pitt calls “South Hills German Victorian,” and indeed a glance at the plat maps shows that this part of the Slopes was thoroughly German when this building went up shortly before 1910. The whole triangle bounded by South 18th Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Street (now Monastery Avenue) was owned by Elizabeth Lenert.

    Entrance

    When your building has an acute angle, but not sharply acute, one way of dealing with it is to put the entrance there and make the corner into a feature rather than something that looks like an unfortunate necessity. The rocket-shaped turret on this building acts like a hinge to make it feel as though the building was meant to fold into this shape.

    Turret
    Cornice

    Otherwise, this is not an elaborate building, but the clever arrangement of bricks at the top of the 18th Street side makes an attractive cornice that doesn’t fall down.

    Chimney pots

    We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.

    Corner Café
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The building would have had a much more dignified and balanced appearance before the ground-floor storefront was filled in; but since a corner bar is close in spirit to a men’s club, patrons should be grateful that it has windows at all.

  • Mother Goose in Highland Park

    Bendet house

    This whimsical fairy-tale cottage is even more amusing when we know its history. According to architectural historian Franklin Toker, it was built on land owned by Edgar Kaufmann’s Kaufmann Development Company, so the architect, Theodore Eichholz, decided to make a parody of the Kaufmann mansion in Fox Chapel—La Tourelle, designed by Benno Janssen and named for its exaggerated conical turret.

    In 2016, an architecture student (since graduated) named William Aldrich made a detailed model of La Tourelle in wood, which is probably the most thorough way to experience La Tourelle on line. You will see immediately what Eichholz was parodying.

    Turret
    Front door
    Jumbled bricks

    The jumbled brickwork all over the front makes us suspect that Mr. Eichholz might be our Master of the Jumbled Bricks.

    Bendet house
    Bendet house

  • The Witches’ Caps on Negley Avenue

    625 to 633 South Negley Avenue

    This row of Queen Anne houses on Negley Avenue in Shadyside surely strikes every passer-by, if for nothing other than their turrets with witches’ caps. The other details are also worth noticing: the ornamental woodwork and the roof slates, for example. The houses are just detached enough that we can see that the sides are made of cheaper brick rather than the stone that faces the street.

    629 South Negley Avenue

    The last one in the row lost its cap many years ago, but in compensation has been ultra-Victorianized with extra polychrome woodwork, as we see on the dormer below.

    Dormer