Some readers doubtless find neglected buildings depressing. And they are, but they are also enlightening. Neglect may preserve details that would have been replaced if the owner had prospered; and here we have a house, originally with a storefront, that keeps its wooden siding and wood trim when other frame houses nearby have long been shrouded in aluminum.
Note the neatly kept new houses built just a few years ago right next door. Calbride is very much a mixed-bag sort of neighborhood, but the trend is upward.
A double house that presents the appearance of a single Second Empire mansion. French architects of the Second Empire might have turned up their Gallic snoots at the crust of lavish details, but those details are carefully balanced and create a pleasing composition, even if they are gaudy in a cheerfully Victorian way.
A short evening stroll on two blocks’ worth of Boyle Street, one of those narrow rowhouse-lined streets on the North Side near Allegheny General Hospital. The street sign above is on a corner house; the sign probably dates from the late 1800s, and the house, though altered with new windows and other adaptations, may date from before the Civil War.
The basement door makes us think of Alice in Wonderland.
This Second Empire row was probably put up in the 1870s or 1880s, replacing earlier smaller houses. Thirty years ago this was a poor neighborhood, but now much restoration is being done, without wholesale displacement of the older residents.
You have a blank wall facing an alley? We can do something about that. The mural is by Jeremy Raymer, who has beautified many spots around the city, especially in Lawrenceville and on the North Side.
An Italianate house, again altered with new windows, but preserving a splendid doorframe and some original carved wooden brackets.
An unusually attractive small apartment building whose details are well preserved. Addendum: It was built in about 1910, and the architects were Allison & Allison.1
Philadelphia Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide, October 27, 1909, p. 684: “Architects Allison & Allison, Westinghouse Building, have prepared plans for a brick and cement apartment house, to be erected at Boyle and Hemlock streets, North Side, for W. B. Nelson. It will be of brick, with stone trimmings, hardwood finish, steam heat and electric lights.” Thanks to David Schwing. ↩︎
This little house is one of the few survivors from the days when much of Carson Street in East Birmingham was residential. It preserves most of its fine mid-Victorian Italianate detail, so it is worth a closer look than most pedestrians on the busy sidewalk of Carson Street usually give it.
One unfortunate change is the entrance. Instead of double doors with an art-glass transom, we have a stock door from the home center and pieces of plywood around it. But the elaborate woodwork surrounding the entrance is still intact.
It is typical of Italianate houses that the downstairs windows are very tall. This is the bright and cheerful branch of Victorian domestic architecture.
It is the northeastern corner of Shadyside now, but this house was built in the neighborhood that developed around the East Liberty station, which was not far from where the East Liberty station is today—now a busway station, but on the same route. This house was built in the 1880s for a family named McCully, to judge by old maps. It has been divided into three apartments, but it has kept many of its 1880s details.
This entrance is probably a replacement for a front porch that ran the width of the building.
The original carved wooden brackets include the abstract cutout botanical decorations that were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s
Craftsman meets Colonial in an attractive double duplex whose details are exceptionally well preserved—notably the showy carved brackets and the windows.
A Victorian frame house, built in the 1890s (according to old maps), whose siding was never replaced with one of the Four Horsemen—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone. The porch was filled in at some point, probably about a century ago—at any rate, so long ago that the siding of the addition is also wood.
A house in a dignified version of the Queen Anne style, but still with plenty of picturesque details, which take on added picturesqueness in sunset light.
The elaborate woodwork and shingles in the gables have been preserved.
A pattern of stock terra-cotta tiles set in the wall may have taken the place of a filled-in window.
Update: Thanks to our correspondent David Schwing, we have more information on this building, which is a kind of split-level apartment house with three floors if we count a high basement, the entrance being between two levels. We had originally called it a duplex, but it seems to be a triplex. The architect was C. P. Hitchens, a developer-architect who designed his own buildings; he bought the lot in 1911.
The arts-and-crafts style of the building, with a tinge of Spanish mission, is expressed in patterned brickwork and big carved wooden brackets. The windows have been replaced, but the tiles and brackets at least have been preserved.
