Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.
For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.
This splendidly restored house is in a kind of variant of the Second Empire style that must have seemed very modern when the architect drew it. It has the exuberantly eclectic boundary-crossing details that made Victorian architecture an adventure. Unlike the strict revivalists, Victorian architects like the unknown who designed this house did not consider themselves bound to a pedantically correct interpretation of one period. Unlike the modernists who came after the strict revivalists, the Victorians felt free to pillage their ideas from every historical period. The result could be an atrocity if the pillaging was done without taste, but with taste it could create complex compositions that were like nothing that had been seen before, but were nevertheless in internal harmony.
Carson Street on the South Side has our best collection of Victorian commercial buildings. For the second place, several neighborhood spine streets are in the running. Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield is one; Butler Street in Lawrenceville is another. But for variety and quality of Victorian architecture, old Pa Pitt might award the second place to East Ohio Street in Dutchtown.
This little house with storefront is probably one of the earliest buildings on the street. Italianate details like the brackets place it in the middle nineteenth century, but otherwise it is not much different from the houses that grew up in Pittsburgh and Allegheny from the moment we had access to bricks.
The contrast with the high-Victorian building next door is striking. This building must have looked frightfully modern in 1888. The next generation of architects would find it old-fashioned, because they had gone back to a more pedantically correct classicism.
This ornate building was put up in the 1880s for an obviously prosperous grocer named F. Beckert, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt can tell you about it. Whoever drew the Ohio Street façade had a great deal of fun tracing angular intersecting lines. In fact those lines may be more clever than we realize at first glance: they disguise the asymmetry of the front. The left bay is wider than the other two, but because of the complexity of the patterns in the ornamentation, we read the building as symmetrical.
Except for the new windows on the second floor, which look a bit staring but do at least seem to fit the holes they were made for, this building is unusually well preserved—a Victorian feast of ornaments of all types, applied lavishly but not without an eye for the overall effect.
The fact that the left half is a sort of narrower duplicate of the right half suggests that it was built as an addition when Mr. Hollander acquired the lot next door.
James W. Drum, who designed the old Indiana County Courthouse across the street, was the architect of this building, whose date of 1880 is prominently displayed in a disk at the top. A walking tour of Philadelphia Street published forty years ago mentions that the building “had Indiana’s first large display windows.” Back in 1986 it was a hardware store; since then the ground floor has been restored to look much more properly Victorian.
This double house, probably built in the 1880s, has had multiple renovations, and some of the vinyl siding has flaked off to reveal the much worse siding that preceded it. Siding has swallowed details of the window and door frames, but the carved roof brackets were grandfathered in with cutouts.
Allegheny West never quite became a slum, but it was down on its luck for a while. Over the past few decades it has very gradually turned into an expensive and trendy neighborhood, and the Western Avenue business district is lively and full of interesting one-off restaurants and shops. In a short stroll, we see some of the variety of commercial and domestic buildings that line one side of the street.
This is what we think of when we hear “Victorian house”: turrets and angles everywhere. The picturesque arrangement also creates interesting and versatile spaces inside.
It’s rare to find something like this: an entire block of shops and apartments built all at once, and still active as shops and apartments. It’s the pre-automobile equivalent of a strip mall. Some alterations have happened over the century and a quarter or so of this row’s life, but many of the characteristic details are well preserved.
