Father Pitt

Tag: Victorian Architecture

  • 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.

    263 and 265 40th Street in 1999
    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.

  • Victorian Gothic in Lawrenceville

    294 Fisk Street

    Hidden behind bushes and later additions is an exceptional example of Victorian Gothic domestic architecture. It seems to have been built in the 1870s to face Sherman Street, a street that vanished by 1890, or possibly existed only on paper; today the original front faces a nameless private alley behind the midcentury-modern Arsenal Place townhouses. The corner has been filled in with a later addition, and then another even later frame-and-stucco addition has been added; but the gables and dormers survive with their Gothic-arch windows and original ornamental woodwork.

    For many years, this house is marked on plat maps as belonging to the Rev. J. G Brown, D. D., who already owned the property (possibly with a smaller house on it) in 1872.

    Dormer
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Victorian Row in Lawrenceville

    247–253 Fist Street

    Separate ownership does funny things to rowhouses. This row of four would have matched originally; some owners have doubled down on the Victorian style, and some have done what they could with modern materials, leading to interesting effects along the property line.

    A porch pediment divided
    247 Fisk Street
    247–253 Fisk Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Penn Main

    4111 Penn Avenue

    “Penn Main” is the name Pittsburghers give to the district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street, which (this being Pittsburgh) is not the main street of anything. On city planning maps, Penn Avenue is the border between Lawrenceville and Bloomfield; and since the sun was shining on the Lawrenceville side when we visited, all these buildings are counted as being in Lawrenceville for planning purposes. We begin above with a nicely preserved example of a typical small Victorian store with apartment above.

    Corner of Penn and Main

    Penn Avenue and Main Street do not meet at a right angle, so the buildings on the corner are forced into odd shapes. The one above deals with its acute angle by blunting the point of it. The one below (seen in a picture from two years ago) has a less offensive obtuse angle to deal with.

    Wilson Drugs
    4059

    The Second Empire style in its Pittsburgh incarnation is common in this section of the city. Little incised designs often decorate the lintels.

    4059
    4057 Penn Avenue

    This building would have matched its neighbor originally, but at some point the storefront was filled in to make an apartment. Now that Penn Main is becoming a desirable neighborhood, the alteration might be reversed.

    4043 and 4045 Penn Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Two quite different houses. The one on the left is a duplex, though it may have been built as a single-family house. The one on the right is a kind of lean-to parasite on its larger neighbor, uncharacteristically set back from the street so that it has a front yard and a porch, as if someone was trying to create a little country house in the city.

    4045 Penn Avenue
    This picture only: Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    This one is getting a going-over. Father Pitt would prefer to see more original-looking windows, but at least the size of the windows has not been altered, and any future owner who feels motivated will be able to replace them with proper double-hung two-over-two sash windows.

  • Some Houses on Maple Lane, Sewickley

    707 Maple Lane

    Three houses on one of the many pleasant residential streets in Sewickley. First, a late-Victorian fantasy of Georgian architecture.

    707 Maple Lane
    709 Maple Lane

    This house has probably had some alterations over the years, but it preserves a unique dormer on the side.

    Dormer
    712 Maple Lane

    Finally, an extravagant riot of gables and dormers.

  • Houses on 24th Street, South Side

    Houses on 24th Street

    A row of houses in different styles, all of them typical of the South Side.

    117 and 118 South 24th Street

    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.

    121 South 24th Street
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    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.

  • Ripley & Co. Glass Works, South Side

    Ripley & Co. Glass Works

    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.

    Round oriel
    Entrance
    Entrance decorations
    Terra cotta
    Over the entrance (blank inscription)

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Waterfront Building

    Waterfront Building, First Avenue side

    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.

    Waterfront Building, river side
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Some Houses on Beaver Street, Sewickley

    36 Beaver Street

    Sewickley is known for its grand houses, and some of the grandest are along Beaver Street, the main street of the village.

    36 Beaver Street
    26 Beaver Street
    26 Beaver Street
    56 Beaver Street
    56 Beaver Street
    56 Beaver Street
    66 Beaver Street
    66 Beaver Street
    59 Beaver Street

    Addendum: This one is the Edward O’Neil house, designed by Rutan & Russell.1

    59 Beaver Street

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1281; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    1. It is pictured in the February, 1904, issue of The Builder, page 20. ↩︎

  • Market Street, Before and After

    Condemned buildings

    Before.

    Rubble from demolished buildings

    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.

    Rubble

    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.

    West side of Market Street
    100 block of Market Street, west side

    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:

    East side of Market Street before demolition

    Cameras: Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.