Father Pitt

Tag: Woodwork

  • A Walk on Boyle Street, North Side

    Boyle Street street sign

    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.

    1300 Boyle Street

    The basement door makes us think of Alice in Wonderland.

    Houses in the 1200 block

    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.

    Rowhouse with sea-turtle mural

    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.

    Rowhouse with sea-turtle mural
    An Italianate house

    An Italianate house, again altered with new windows, but preserving a splendid doorframe and some original carved wooden brackets.

    Woodwork above the front door
    Brackets
    1320 Boyle Street
    Small apartment building

    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

    Front elevation of the apartment building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
    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. ↩︎
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  • Italianate House on Carson Street, South Side

    2120 East Carson Street

    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.

    Front door

    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.

    Transom and lintel
    Woodwork
    Lantern
    Downstairs window

    It is typical of Italianate houses that the downstairs windows are very tall. This is the bright and cheerful branch of Victorian domestic architecture.

    Bracket

    The windowsills rest on ornate iron brackets.

    Bracket
    Lintel
    Upstairs window
    Upstairs windows and cornice
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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  • Finials and Brackets on Carson Street, South Side

    Decorations at the top of a Victorian building
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

  • House from the 1880s in Shadyside

    5973 Alder Street

    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.

    Front door

    This entrance is probably a replacement for a front porch that ran the width of the building.

    Carved brackets

    The original carved wooden brackets include the abstract cutout botanical decorations that were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s

    5973 Alder Street
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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  • Double Duplex in Crafton

    91–97 Bradford Avenue

    Craftsman meets Colonial in an attractive double duplex whose details are exceptionally well preserved—notably the showy carved brackets and the windows.

    91–97 Bradford Avenue
    91–97 Bradford Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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  • Frame Victorian in Park Place

    222 East End Avenue
    Olympus E-20N.

    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.

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  • Brick Queen Anne in Shadyside

    401 South Highland Avenue

    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.

    Gable

    The elaborate woodwork and shingles in the gables have been preserved.

    Gable
    Terra-cotta tiles

    A pattern of stock terra-cotta tiles set in the wall may have taken the place of a filled-in window.

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  • Arts-and-Crafts Apartments in Shadyside

    728 Summerlea Street

    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.

    Perspective view
    Bracket
    Entrance overhang
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • 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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