Tag: Woodwork

  • A Stroll on McPherson Boulevard, North Point Breeze

    6755 McPherson Boulevard

    North Point Breeze is an eclectic mixture of every kind of housing from Queen Anne mansions to duplexes to medium-sized apartment buildings. A walk on just one block of McPherson Boulevard passes a jumbled assortment of styles. Since the neighborhood has not been rich in the past few decades, many of the buildings preserve details that would have been lost if their owners had been wealthier.

    We begin with a Shingle Style house that has lost its shingles but retains its angular projections and low-sloped roof.

    6755
    6753 McPherson Boulevard

    A narrow stone-fronted Queen Anne house with a square turret. For some reason the stone has been painted white. The porch pediment preserves some elaborate woodwork.

    Pediment with woodwork
    6745 McPherson Boulevard

    A brick house laid out like a narrow Pittsburgh Foursquare; its outstanding feature is the round oriel on the second floor.

    6736 McPherson Boulevard

    Here is a simple but large Pittsburgh Foursquare. Many of its distinctive details have been lost, but the round bay in the dining room must be very pleasant from the inside.

    6730

    An older foursquare with original shingles and elaborate woodwork.

    Dormer
    Gable with decorative woodwork
    Decorated bracket
    6730
    6728 and 6726

    A double house, probably from the 1920s, that keeps its Mediterranean-style tiled roof.

    6728 and 6726
    6723 McPherson Boulevard

    A small apartment building.

    6713 and 6715

    A matched set of duplexes with Mission-style tiled overhangs.

    6709 and 6711 McPherson Boulevard
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    Finally, a double duplex that must have looked up to date when it was built. It probably had a tiled overhang along the roofline above the second-floor windows.


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  • Folk Art in a Gable in Beltzhoover

    602 Beltzhoover Avenue

    Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.1 The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.

    Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.

    602 Beltzhoover Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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  • A. R. D. Gillespie House, Shadyside

    909 Amberson Avenue

    Some Tudor houses (or “English,” as they were usually called) stick just enough timbers in the stucco to get the message across that this is supposed to be Merrie England. This one is a bravura performance in woodwork. The 1910 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps shows it as owned by A. R. D. Gillespie, who was probably the original owner.

    Woodwork
    909 Amberson Avenue
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • Shingly Victorian in Coraopolis

    941 2nd Avenue, front elevation

    This frame house across from the train station is a feast of Victorian woodwork, lovingly picked out in a tasteful polychrome paint scheme.

    Gable
    Porch woodwork
    Perspective view
    From down the street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
  • Abandoned House in Homewood

    7809 Susquehanna Street

    Homewood is prospering now more than it has done in decades, but there are still many forgotten corners. This house, in the part of Homewood traditionally called Brushton, has been abandoned and forgotten for a very long time, though the other houses on the street are inhabited and well kept. Because it has been left alone for decades, it preserves details of crumbling shingle and woodwork that have been replaced on all its neighbors. It appears to have been built in the 1890s for J. M. Gruber, and it is a good example of how the Queen Anne style filtered down to the middle classes.

    Gable with shingles
    Gable and oriel
  • 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.
  • Valley Presbyterian Church, Imperial

    Valley Presbyterian Church

    This charming Arts-and-Crafts Gothic church is the most distinguished building in the little hamlet of Imperial. It was built, according to the date stone, in 1911 for a congregation that had been founded in 1840, and the large cemetery behind the church has tombstones going back to that foundation.

    Date stone: 1840 and 1911
    Valley Presbyterian Church
    Tower

    The outstanding feature of the church is its belfry, with simple and massive woodwork that echoes the Gothic arches below, but also flares out into bell shapes, like a Sunday-school-supplement illustration of the bells within.

    Belfry
    Belfry
    Rear of the church
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    A postwar Sunday-school wing in the rear is built from nearly matching brick.

  • Front Door on Sarah Street

    Front door on Sarah Street
    Woodwork
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • St. James Convent, Sewickley

    St. James Convent

    Even though it is on the grounds of a parish that is still open, with a school that is still open, this glorious Second Empire building is abandoned and crumbling, with scraggly Trees of Heaven—the badge of abandonment—taking root all around it. In its current state it looks like a drawing by Charles Addams.

    St. James Convent
    Roof woodwork
    Close-up of some woodwork
    Dormer
    Dormer from the side
    Dormer from the front
    Different dormer from the front
    St. James Convent
    St. James Convent
    St. James Convent
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
  • Gatehouse, Mount Lebanon Cemetery

    Gatehouse at the Mt. Lebanon Cemetery

    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.

    Gable and chimneys
    Chimney
    Roof bracket
    Porch bracket
    Gatehouse
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.