Permanent Holiday
Lighting in
Mt. Lebanon, PA

Mt. Lebanon was incorporated in 1912 as a First Class Township and had 34,075 residents at the 2020 census, sitting four to six miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. Its historic district contains 3,341 contributing buildings and 21 contributing sites, developed between 1874 and about 1945. That is one of the largest concentrations of contributing structures anywhere in this service area, and it means the great majority of houses here were built before the war, to styles that predate the flat aluminum fascia most modern lighting hardware assumes.

The district's dominant styles are Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, American Foursquare, Craftsman and Bungalow, and Queen Anne. Each of those presents a different eave. American Foursquare is the friendliest: a near-cube under a hipped roof with a broad, simple, continuous overhang, which is close to a perfect substrate for one uninterrupted line.

Colonial Revival gives a level cornice and a symmetrical front, nearly as straightforward. Tudor Revival changes direction across the elevation with steep cross gables, so a single horizontal run flattens the exact geometry that makes the house look like itself.

Queen Anne adds towers, bays and porch roofs, each with its own fascia. Craftsman is the awkward one, because its deep overhangs and exposed rafter tails are already the visual event on the front of the house, and a channel run across them competes with detail the architecture was built around.

Knowing which of those five a house is before anything is specified changes the quote, the layout and the result. Two houses on the same Mt. Lebanon street, built eight years apart, can want opposite treatments.

The township grew from 2,258 residents at the 1920 census to 13,403 at the 1930 census, and that surge followed transit rather than roads. Streetcar service opened on July 1, 1901, a second line followed in 1924, and the Liberty Tubes opened in 1924, with the Red Line light rail serving the township today.

Streetcar suburbs were platted for walking, which means houses sit close to the sidewalk on modest frontages. Close viewing distance is unforgiving about a run that is not level and generous about output, so on most of these streets a lower, straighter line beats a brighter one.

The daytime read carries real weight in a district of this size. Most of the pre-war stock carries painted wood trim, and against that a color-matched channel reads as a trim detail from the pavement. On the stucco and half-timbered elevations common to the Tudor Revival houses there is rarely a single trim color to match against, and accepting that the channel will be visible somewhere and choosing where is more honest than promising it will vanish.

A last local point. Fifteen parks are scattered over 200 acres in this township, and on any street where the planting is established the sightline from the pavement to the front of a house is partly screened between May and October. It is worth checking the view from where people actually walk before a layout is fixed, and it is worth asking whether any district-related review applies to a specific address before anything is fixed to the front of the house.