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.
This frame house across from the train station is a feast of Victorian woodwork, lovingly picked out in a tasteful polychrome paint scheme.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A postwar Sunday-school wing in the rear is built from nearly matching brick.
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.
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.
