Father Pitt

Tag: Victorian Architecture

  • Victorian House on South 18th Street

    House on South 18th Street

    This is the kind of eclectic mess twentieth-century architects meant when they vigorously condemned everything “Victorian.” You can hardly pin it down to any historical style. That would probably identify it as “Queen Anne,” the term for Victorian domestic architecture that is a hodgepodge of every historical style, with strange angles thrown in for added picturesque effect. And to those twentieth-century architects, old Pa Pitt has only this to say: this house is a lot more attractive and a lot more pleasant to live in than anything you came up with.

  • H. Daub Building, West End

    No one has to ask when this distinguished Victorian commercial building was constructed. There was a brief time about fifteen years ago when the West End looked like the next trendy artsy neighborhood—for example, you can just barely make out that this building briefly housed a Steinway piano dealer. It seems that the neighborhood was too far out of the way for the arts community to take firm roots. The neighborhood is still pleasant, but much of the business district is deserted.

  • Carved Brackets

    Carved brackets over the front door of a Victorian rowhouse on the South Side.

  • Front Doors of the South Side

    The famous Victorian front doors of the South Side are featured on posters and in picture books on coffee tables all over western Pennsylvania. There is an endless variety to the woodwork on these South Side rowhouses. Old Pa Pitt was out walking on the South Side and decided to concentrate on doors: here is the collection he made in just half an hour’s stroll. Click on any picture to enlarge it.

    Many of these doorways have decorative stained-glass transoms over the door, often with the address worked into the glass:

    Of course, no collection of South Side front doors would be complete without a Kool Vent awning on an alley house:

  • House on Carson Street

    Carson Street is the commercial spine of the South Side, but occasionally we run across a house left over from the time before Carson was almost exclusively commercial. Most of them have small offices on the ground floors now, but they retain their domestic external appearance. This house strikes Father Pitt as a halfway point between Second Empire and Italianate styles in local rowhouses; it’s notable for its prickly decorative ironwork on the roof.