Landscape Lighting
Installation in
Mt. Lebanon, PA

The Mt. Lebanon Historic District covers 1,306 acres and contains 3,341 contributing buildings put up between 1874 and 1945. That is not a preserved street, it is most of a township, and it went onto the National Register in 2014.

The place took its name from the Cedars of Lebanon because the landscape reminded people of them, incorporated as a first class township in 1912, and grew from 2,258 residents in 1920 to 13,403 in 1930, an increase of 493.6 percent inside a decade. The district takes in 21 contributing sites alongside those buildings.

The streetcar explains the shape of it. The first line opened on July 1, 1901 and the Liberty Tubes followed in 1924, putting downtown Pittsburgh four to six miles away and turning farmland into blocks. Streetcar-era plats produce a particular lot: narrow frontage, a deep back garden, a driveway down one side and a house set close to its neighbor.

Every one of those features constrains where light can go and where it must not. Mt. Lebanon is a first ring suburb, which in lighting terms means city sky glow on the horizon in one direction and darker ground in the other.

Five styles dominate the stock, which are Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, American Foursquare, Craftsman bungalow and Queen Anne. The Foursquare is the interesting case.

It is a plain cube under a hipped roof with a full-width porch, and the porch is the entire design. Light set behind the rail or under the porch roof makes that depth read from the street, whereas uplighting the cube itself only makes a box glow.

On a street where thirty houses were built to a handful of patterns within twenty years, one property lit differently from the rest stands out whether or not that was intended. Color temperature gives it away before brightness does. A cool white house in a row of warm ones is visible from a block away, so matching what is already on the street is a decision worth taking consciously rather than by default.

Fifteen parks across roughly 200 acres sit inside 6.06 square miles, which is a lot of public green for a township of that size. Where street trees have reached maturity they become a constraint as well as an asset, because an established root plate near the curb is the reason a layout on an older lot gets worked out on the ground instead of drawn from a survey. Fifteen parks also mean fifteen pieces of unlit public ground, and a lot backing onto one of them inherits a dark boundary it did not pay for.

34,075 people in 6.06 square miles is dense for a suburb, and the practical consequence is that nearly every garden here is overlooked. One test settles most aiming arguments. Stand in the neighbor's garden and look back.

If a fixture reads as a bright point from there, it is aimed wrong, however good it looks from the client's own patio. Density is also why access for landscape lighting maintenance matters here. A fixture that cannot be reached without crossing a neighbor's ground is a fixture that will not get maintained.