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.
The best preserved of the old factories on the South Side, this was acquired, soon after the large corner building was built, by the United States Glass Co. It now belongs to the Salvation Army, which has kept the exterior beautifully.
Built in about 1872, the Waterfront Building is one of the unique row of surviving riverside commercial buildings Pittsburghers call Firstside. It dates from the time when the Monongahela wharf was a chaotically busy place, with steamboats lined up at every available space to load and unload. Now it is separated from the river by a boulevard and an expressway. Above, the First Avenue side; below, the river side.
Sewickley is known for its grand houses, and some of the grandest are along Beaver Street, the main street of the village.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1281; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
Before.
After.
Preservationists fought a losing battle to save these buildings, not because any one of them was an architectural masterpiece, but because the 100 block of Market Street was one of the few remaining blocks downtown lined with mid-Victorian buildings on both sides. They predated not only the skyscraper age but also the age of six-storey commercial palaces that preceded the skyscrapers.
If there is any silver lining to the demolition, it is that the open space allows a full view of the buildings on the other side of the street, without resorting to too much photographic trickery.
Not that old Pa Pitt has ever been above photographic trickery, as he demonstrated a few months ago with a picture of the whole block of condemned buildings before they came down:
The gatehouse for the Mount Lebanon Cemetery is a well-preserved vernacular-Gothic frame house. Not all the details have survived—the ugly front door is certainly not original—but more of the original decoration is preserved than we usually see on houses of this type in our area.
An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.
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.
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.
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.
We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.
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.
On Liberty Avenue downtown.
