The historic preservation board block party tours

Which is the oldest house on your street? When was your own home built, who was the original owner, who was the builder? What are the styles of all these houses, and why do they look the way they do?

Find out on a guided history tours of your street.

Tours are sponsored by the Mt. Lebanon Historic Preservation Board and are a way to help residents learn more about the architectural character of their homes and neighborhoods and encourage them to preserve Mt. Lebanon’s distinctive housing stock and update their properties with care. 

Tours can be arranged through the municipality’s Public Information Office at 412-343-3407. 

They are conducted by present or former members of the Historic Preservation Board or volunteers who worked on Mt. Lebanon’s Cultural Resource Survey.

Please try to call as far in advance of a block party as possible, as tour guides need to be scheduled well in advance and each tour requires several hours of preparation.

 Tour Guide volunteers are needed!

Here's what tour goers have learned...

• On Willow Drive, residents were interested to learn that almost all of the 30 houses on their street were built in similar styles and with similar materials in just one big burst of activity between late 1936 and 1939. And that just two builders built a third of the houses on the street. Though none of the houses look exactly alike, almost all are similarly sized and built of red brick with slate roofs, giving the tree-lined street a charming consistency.
• *On Catalpa Place in Sunset Hills just about every style of house built in Mt. Lebanon from the early 1920s through the 1950s is represented, with houses of very different styles from different periods often sitting side by side.
• Sometimes, fascinating parallels between past and present show up. Kathy Rooney learned, for example, that the original owner of her Catalpa Place house moved to Mt. Lebanon from the Perrysville neighborhood in the city, the same neighborhood where she grew up. Kathy and her husband, Ray Sokolowski, live in an American Foursquare that still has most of its original Arts & Crafts era details intact.

“Our neighborhood really enjoyed our tour,” Rooney says. “It was a bonding experience for us to walk up and down the street learning about each other’s houses.”