Father Pitt

Tag: Victorian Architecture

Arch Street, North Side

Arch Street, which is now included in the Mexican War Streets despite not bearing the name of a battle or a general, is a typical North Side combination of dense rowhouses, small apartment buildings, and backstreet stores. Here are just a few sights within one block of the street.

An exceptionally elaborate Queen Anne house whose owner has used bright but well-chosen colors to emphasize the wealth of detail on the front.

Two modest houses from before the Civil War; the brick house at left is dated 1842.

A small apartment building with a well-balanced classical front.

Some fine woodwork surrounds a front door.

The colorful dormer steals the show, but enlarge the picture to appreciate the terra-cotta grotesques on the cornice.

This little building looks as though it dates from the 1920s. Although it is quite different in style from its neighbors, it fits harmoniously by sharing the same setback and similar height.

A backstreet grocery that is currently functioning as a backstreet grocery—an unusual phenomenon in city neighborhoods these days. The apartment building above it has some interesting and attractive brickwork.

Sony Alpha 3000.

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February 24, 2025
A Walk on North Avenue in Manchester

A few weeks ago old Pa Pitt took a wintry walk on North Avenue (which used to be Fayette Street back when it did not run all the way through to North Avenue on the rest of the North Side). He took piles of pictures, and although he published four articles so far from that walk (one, two, three, four), there’s still quite a collection backed up waiting to be published. Thus this very long article, which is a smorgasbord of Victorian domestic architecture with a few other eras thrown in. Above, a pair of Italianate houses. They both preserve the tall windows typical of the high Italianate style; the one on the right still has (or has restored) its two-over-two panes.

Many more pictures…

February 15, 2025
Elias Kauffeld Building, South Side

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

A particularly splendid mid-Victorian building from 1881, as we can see by the beehive date stone in the middle of the façade.

The architect would probably have told you that the style was Renaissance, but mid-Victorian architects were much freer in their interpretation of historical styles than the next generation would be.

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February 14, 2025
Fulton Bell Foundry

This building seems to date from before the Civil War, possibly the 1850s. It was designed in the very free interpretation of Italian Renaissance that was popular at the time; later architects would have studied their historical precedents more closely, and later architects than those would have repudiated historical precedent altogether.

The building originally belonged to the Fulton Bell Foundry, which made bells for decades in downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a remnant of Victorian Second Avenue. All the remnants of Second Avenue downtown are on the south side of the Boulevard of the Allies; the street was widened in the 1920s by tearing out the buildings on the north side.

The well-preserved carved stone lintels have been lovingly cleaned.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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February 14, 2025
Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield

Carson Street on the South Side is reputed to be one of the best-preserved Victorian streetscapes in America. Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield may not come quite up to that standard, but it is probably second in Pittsburgh. The commercial district was built up in the 1880s and 1890s. Like Carson Street, it preserves many Victorian commercial buildings, along with a peppering of later styles. These pictures are all of the northeast side, because the sun was behind the southwest side.

A good example of the most basic form of Pittsburgh Rundbogenstil, the German hybrid of classical and Romanesque architecture that old Pa Pitt mentions every chance he gets because he likes to say “Rundbogenstil.” In the 1800s, before it became the most Italian of our Italian neighborhoods, Bloomfield was mostly German.

A Second Empire building from the 1880s.

This building dates from the 1890s. It probably had a date and inscription in that crest at the top of the façade, but later owners obliterated the evidence.

We saw this 1924 building before at dusk; here it is in bright sunlight. The bright light gives us a chance to appreciate the decorative details with a long lens.

Kodak EasyShare Z981.

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February 10, 2025
Your Carson Street Snow Globe

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.

(more…)

January 16, 2025
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.

December 29, 2024
Shingly Victorian in Coraopolis

This frame house across from the train station is a feast of Victorian woodwork, lovingly picked out in a tasteful polychrome paint scheme.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 16, 2024
Alpha Terrace, East Liberty
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.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
1. Old Pa Pitt is nearly certain of this attribution. The Wikipedia article, possibly following the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, attributes the design to Murphy & Hamilton, but Father Pitt is fairly sure that Murphy & Hamilton were contractors, not architects; they probably built the terraces. Alpha Terrace is attributed to Steen in a Historic Resource Survey Form for another of his buildings that was demolished anyway (PDF). The style of Alpha Terrace is very similar to the style of Steen’s downtown YMCA (demolished long ago), which, though it was on a much grander scale, used the same prickly witch’s caps and squarish dormers; it was pictured in the American Architect and Building News for February 10, 1883.
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November 8, 2024
Pair of Victorian Houses in Lawrenceville

Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

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.

Photographed in 1999 with an Imperial 620 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.

November 5, 2024