Carson Street on the South Side is reputed to be one of the best-preserved Victorian commercial streets in North America. Mere snow cannot deter old Pa Pitt from his duty of documenting the city around him, so here is a generous album of Carson Street buildings, most of Victorian vintage, with falling snow for added picturesque effect.
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.
This frame house across from the train station is a feast of Victorian woodwork, lovingly picked out in a tasteful polychrome paint scheme.
Alpha Terrace, a set of unusually fine Victorian rowhouses designed by James T. Steen1 in an eclectic Romanesque with bits of Second Empire and Gothic thrown in, is a historic district of its own. The houses are on both sides of Beatty Street in East Liberty. The row on the northwest side of the street went up in about 1885.
The houses on the southeast side of the street are a few years newer, probably from about 1894, and they incorporate more of the Queen Anne style, with shingles and ornate woodwork.
The rest of our pictures are from the sunny side of the street, for very practical photographic reasons. We’ll return when the light is better for the houses on the southeast side.
Separate ownership is not always kind to terraces like this, but the aluminum siding on the roof is about the worst alteration Alpha Terrace has suffered.
A pair of stylish Victorian houses opposite Arsenal Park on 40th Street. The one on the right is in the high Queen Anne style, with a turret and odd-shaped windows and a wraparound porch. The one on the left is smaller and more restrained, but only relatively.
These two houses have both had quite a bit of work put into them in the past few years. A quarter-century ago, before Lawrenceville began to be a trendy neighborhood, Father Pitt captured these same two houses with a plastic box camera.
Several things have changed, especially in the house on the left. The porch has been removed; it looks as though it was a later addition, and the removal may have restored the house to something more like its original appearance. The sawed-off Gothic peak on the third floor has been restored. The glass blocks by the front door are still there, but perhaps that is how we know this is a Pittsburgh house and not one in Baltimore or Boston. As for the house on the right, it has been cleaned and restored to picture-perfect condition.
Hidden behind bushes and later additions is an exceptional example of Victorian Gothic domestic architecture. It seems to have been built in the 1870s to face Sherman Street, a street that vanished by 1890, or possibly existed only on paper; today the original front faces a nameless private alley behind the midcentury-modern Arsenal Place townhouses. The corner has been filled in with a later addition, and then another even later frame-and-stucco addition has been added; but the gables and dormers survive with their Gothic-arch windows and original ornamental woodwork.
For many years, this house is marked on plat maps as belonging to the Rev. J. G Brown, D. D., who already owned the property (possibly with a smaller house on it) in 1872.
Separate ownership does funny things to rowhouses. This row of four would have matched originally; some owners have doubled down on the Victorian style, and some have done what they could with modern materials, leading to interesting effects along the property line.
“Penn Main” is the name Pittsburghers give to the district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street, which (this being Pittsburgh) is not the main street of anything. On city planning maps, Penn Avenue is the border between Lawrenceville and Bloomfield; and since the sun was shining on the Lawrenceville side when we visited, all these buildings are counted as being in Lawrenceville for planning purposes. We begin above with a nicely preserved example of a typical small Victorian store with apartment above.
Penn Avenue and Main Street do not meet at a right angle, so the buildings on the corner are forced into odd shapes. The one above deals with its acute angle by blunting the point of it. The one below (seen in a picture from two years ago) has a less offensive obtuse angle to deal with.
The Second Empire style in its Pittsburgh incarnation is common in this section of the city. Little incised designs often decorate the lintels.
This building would have matched its neighbor originally, but at some point the storefront was filled in to make an apartment. Now that Penn Main is becoming a desirable neighborhood, the alteration might be reversed.
Two quite different houses. The one on the left is a duplex, though it may have been built as a single-family house. The one on the right is a kind of lean-to parasite on its larger neighbor, uncharacteristically set back from the street so that it has a front yard and a porch, as if someone was trying to create a little country house in the city.
This one is getting a going-over. Father Pitt would prefer to see more original-looking windows, but at least the size of the windows has not been altered, and any future owner who feels motivated will be able to replace them with proper double-hung two-over-two sash windows.
Three houses on one of the many pleasant residential streets in Sewickley. First, a late-Victorian fantasy of Georgian architecture.
This house has probably had some alterations over the years, but it preserves a unique dormer on the side.
Finally, an extravagant riot of gables and dormers.
A row of houses in different styles, all of them typical of the South Side.
We’ve seen these two tiny frame houses before. They date from the Civil War era, and unlike almost all the others of their type and age on the South Side they retain their wood siding. The one on the left is an odd shape: there is a kink in the South Side street grid at 24th street, so the alley does not meet the street at a right angle.
This eclectic Victorian has a large dormer on the fourth floor, and another thing that is sort of a dormer, but not exactly, projecting from the roof and lining up with a slightly extended section, giving the house the effect of a three-storey tower.
