In this early photo, the front of the house is to the left and facing west. The main entrance and porch are hidden by shrubbery. To the right and in the center is the south face.
James Van Trump states, “The architect of this fantasy is not known. . . . One thing is certain: it was certainly not the work of an amateur designer, which rules out John F. Singer.”
Samuel Taylor, husband of Elizabeth Duff Taylor, became involved with the Singer house. Martha McElroy Allison tells in the chapter on the Taylor School in the Annals,
Samuel Taylor was an architect and builder; a man of keen, concentrated mind and highly esteemed by his fellow craftsmen as well as by his fellow citizens. When the architect in charge of building the Singer mansion died before its completion, Mrs. Singer called Mr. Taylor to finish it. No greater appreciation could have been given a builder, for the Singer house was one of unusual elegance and beauty in its period.
Walter Kidney writes,
As with most Victorian architecture, stylistic purity was not a consideration. The walls of coursed rubble have rusticated quoins, very Renaissance, the vergeboards have little turned pendants—Italianate—on their cusps, and the lambrequins and window hoods are of an elaboration beyond anything that an ordinary Gothic Revivalist, let alone any medieval architect, would have used. There is twice the usual amount of everything, except on the relatively restrained porches.
Ilka M. Stotler comments,
Inspecting the house one gains the impression that the Singers had enjoyed the advantages of European travel and country squire life, or possibly, had not too long before come from England. At all events, they planned their house as a gothic-type chateau of rough-dressed sandstone. . . .
The rugged thickness of the handcut sandstone block walls is not less than 18 inches. Exterior woodwork, and there is much of it, is seasoned oak, now bleached a dull grey. Trim on dormer and several oriel windows, cornices and balustrades are all of hand-carved oak. The cornices were sand-sprayed to give them weather resistance and to better simulate carvings in stone. Everywhere externally are odd bits of ornamentation such as the little girl's head with curls, beneath the dining-room baywindow.
Stone masons, she tells, came in from Philadelphia. Workers in marble, and the marble they worked on, arrived from Italy.
As to the exterior . . . . to really appreciate the structure it must be reconstructed loving with the eye of imagination and a certain veneration for the Past. Thus it becomes, in the 1860 and thereafter, until 1888 or so, a jewel set amidst lovely gardens, fruit-orchards and vineyards sloping up the hill and ending at what is now Foliage Avenue to the rear and Hill Avenue at the side.
Gilchrist shares this viewpoint, “The landscaping was of the most artistic conception. . . . all kinds of flowers and shrubbery surrounded the mansion.”
The approximately 30 acres included the chapel, the gatekeeper’s lodge, the gardener’s house, the stream-fed pond with a boathouse, and the stable for the horses and the carriages.
Ilka M. Stotler writes, “Roofing for the house, the chapel and gatekeeper’s lodge are of grey and rose octagon-shaped slates, and the wrought iron ridge poles, finials and lightning rods were of excellent craftsmanship.“
James Van Trump visited the Singer house over a period of fifty years.
I first encountered the enchanted house in 1926, when I went to art school at Carnegie Institute of Technology. One of my classmates who lived on Singer Place (the street on which the house is located) would ask me out to his house when we had to make tracings for our art history classes. It was then that I first saw the huge house, on its great stone terrace, looming against the darkening sky. I fell in love with its dark medieval-Victorian mystery then, and it has always haunted me since.
Foliage grew around the house and it became harder to see.
The house is magnificently sited, about halfway up the small ridge that forms the northwest escarpment of the East Liberty valley. Arising majestically, and yet mysteriously, from the intricate hillside verdure, it seems to beckon tantalizingly through its masks of begrimed stone and Gothic traceried wood. . . .
Through the years, Van Trump did not lose his fascination with the house.
On a day of high summer I recently visited the great grey house again. As long ago, it still does cast a spell. It beckons, it invites to mystery and the unfathomable past.
James D. Van Trump, Life and Architecture in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, 1983, pp. 257–261.
Martha McElroy Allison, “The Taylor School,” in Annals of Old Wilkinsburg and Vicinity: The Village 1788‐1888, Wilkinsburg, Pa.: Group for Historical Research, 1940, p. 449.
Walter C. Kidney, Landmark Architecture: Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, 1985, p. 339.
Harry C. Gilchrist, History of Wilkinsburg. 1927, p. 88.
Wilkinsburg Public Library Digital Archives:
Ilka M. Stotler, research and writing, “The Singer Place in Wilkinsburg.” Paper read before the Wilkinsburg Historical Society in 1954.