As this part of what used to be Bellefield turned into an apartment district, a few old houses remained here and there, turned into apartments. This one suffered less alteration than most, and its splendid curved porch hints at the leisurely exurban atmosphere of Victorian Bellefield.
This building on Wood Street, right across from the subway station, was probably put up in the 1880s; it appears on an 1890 map as belonging to Jonathan D. Thompson, and in 1923 still belonged to J. D. Thompson. The elaborate stone front is liberally decorated with incised patterns. We would call the style Italianate; the architect probably thought of it as Italian Renaissance.
For its size, McDonald has an unusually rich architectural heritage. The Cladden Building sits right at the center of the borough and almost defines downtown McDonald with its exuberant outburst of Victorian eclecticism. The acute angle of the building seems to pivot on the big round turret on the corner. Almost certainly the original entrance to the corner storefront was right on that corner, with the structure above held up by an egregiously fat Corinthian pillar.
Built in 1881 for St. Mary’s, an Irish Catholic parish in Lawrenceville, this old school is now neatly restored as apartments.
Much of the original woodwork is preserved, including incised folk-art decorations typical of the period.
A well-preserved cast-iron front, though the building has lost its hat. Father Pitt would probably paint it a different color.
More of the Victorian business district of Bloomfield, from the age when it was a very German neighborhood. We begin with a building we have seen before, which has just finished a renovation and is ready for another century and a quarter of use. The tall third floor, as old Pa Pitt remarked before, looks like an assembly room of some sort.
The rest of these buildings all date from the 1890s.
The date stone gives us the date 1890 and the name of the owner, P. Biedenbach.
Two of a row of modest houses with storefronts put up in the 1890s.
A building that preserves its corner entrance, though not the original treatment of it.
Elaborate brickwork distinguishes this building from its neighbors.
Another small storefront with living quarters above.
Samuel T. McClarren, a very successful Victorian architect and a resident of nearby Thornburg, designed this landmark building, which was put up in 1896.
A small alteration to the front gives us an example of how important the little details are to the appearance of a building. The arched windows in the top floor have been shortened, as we can see by the slightly different shade of brick where they have been filled in. The original design would have created a single broad stripe from the arches at the top to the storefront below. Interrupting that composition makes the building look awkward and top-heavy. The ground floor has also been altered in a way that obscures the vigor of the design. Once we have said that, however, we should acknowledge that the building is generally in a good state of preservation and praise the Historical Society of Carnegie for keeping it up.
This building has a very difficult lot to deal with, and the architect must have found it an interesting challenge. First, the lot is a triangle. A kind of turret blunts the odd angle on the Main Street end and turns it from a bug into a feature.
The second challenge is that one long side of the lot is smack up against Chartiers Creek, a minor river that is placid most of the time but can be a raging torrent when storms make it angry. The foundations would have had to take all the moods of the river into account, and the fact that the building has stood through disastrous floods suggests that Mr. McClarren knew what he was up to.
A view from across Chartiers Creek shows us the sharp point of the triangle in the rear.
A storefront with living quarters upstairs in a slightly prickly Victorian style. The upraised arm on the corner makes it look as though the building is trying to hail a streetcar.
The inscription has been obliterated, which is not playing fair. But the building appears on a 1901 plat map as belonging to someone named Kissner; it was probably built in the 1890s.
You can read the history of Lutz’s Meat Market at the Hill District Digital History site, where you’ll also see a picture by Teenie Harris, who, as usual, snapped the shutter at exactly the moment that captured everyone in the scene in the most characteristic pose.
The building has been beautifully restored, including the elaborate woodwork of the cornice and storefront.
These corner entrances are often filled in, so it makes old Pa Pitt happy to see this one preserved and carefully restored.
Perrysville Avenue started as a plank road, with tollgates, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it began to fill up as the spine of a pleasant suburban neighborhood of Allegheny. Today Perry Hilltop is a strange mixture of appalling decay and beautiful restoration: it has never quite got off the ground as a trendy neighborhood, but some of the houses have been beautifully preserved. The splendid Dutch Colonial mansion above, for example, is in very good shape. Note the original windows. It was probably built around the turn of the twentieth century.
A Victorian frame house that preserves some of its original details, including the trim around the windows. It appears on an 1882 plat map, so it probably dates from the 1870s.
This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.
This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.
