When Pittsburgh architect Louis Sauer designed Harbor Walk, a design issue he dealt with was the potential monotony of 99 houses built in only two widths, 14 and 18 feet.  For the three bedroom homes, he used a variety of front door and window placements; the two bedroom homes have a uniform facade (with two exceptions — can you find one each in the 500 and 600 blocks of South Hanover?).

To promote the image of separate homes, he used three brick colors and three shingle colors.  No two adjacent homes in Harbor Walk were built with either the same brick or same shingle colors.  This gave a quiet variation to individualize the homes.

The three brick colors were Glen Gery 46 (pink) paired with Celotex Chocolate Brown shingles, Glen Gery 47 (brown) with Celotex Olive shingles and Glen Gery 43 (red) with Celotex Colonial Black shingles.  Thus, the individualization of homes included both front facade and roof.

The architect got clever with patterns — the most obvious are the nine two-bedroom homes along the north side of Hanover Square.  Every other home uses pink brick, and the intervening homes alternate brown and red brick.  As designed and built, the roof shingles followed the same alternating-within-alternating pattern.

An oddity is that all the front stoops and planters were built not by Harkins, but by the contractor who did the curbs and sidewalks.  All of them ended up with Glen Gery 43 red brick, regardless of the facade color.

It’s not likely that you’ll need to do much with your front wall brick, but the shingles are coming up on their third iteration.  Unfortunately, Celotex no longer makes the standard, 3-tab shingles called for by the architect.  However, most roofers have been able to match the original shingle colors — black is easy, the dark brown is a common color, and the olive is pretty much a medium gray.

Why do you care about all this?  In a couple of cases, a roof was replaced with one of the other colors, resulting in pairs of homes with the same color roof, eliminating the variation that’s a hallmark of the original design.  There are also a few cases where the roofer went off the rails on shingle color, making the house stand out in bright contrast to the others in the block.

So, although the original Celotex shingles are no longer available, your roofer can come up with a match that will maintain your home’s original look.

From Harbor Walk Happenings, February-2018