The DiBiases’ home as it looks today, after a restroation in 2017..

by Ellen DiBiase, Friendship Community Group

In the grand tradition of being nosy, or “nebby” as Pittsburghers call it, Friendship is hosting its biennial neighborhood house tour on Sunday, Oct. 5, which will feature seven homes and even a special surprise location or two this year. For those who are new to the area or may just be unfamiliar with house tours, this event is basically an open invitation to come explore some of Friendship’s most admired private homes. Guests will be able to get a behind-the-scenes look at residences you may have driven by and wondered about dozens of times. Every home has a story, and part of Friendship Community Group’s mission is to preserve and share the beloved intricacies of our neighborhood with others.
When our family of three first moved to Friendship in September of 2017, we looked forward to the prospect of being on the Friendship House Tour someday, having already been made aware that our newly renovated home was originally designed in 1904 by famed Pittsburgh architect, F.J. Osterling. We’ve now been in our home for eight years, and the timing has finally worked out for us to share our historically significant home as part of this year’s tour.
F.J. Osterling is known for designing the Union Trust building downtown as well as the Negley-Gwinner-Harter house on Fifth Avenue in Shadyside, famous for being wrapped in a giant red bow during the holidays. He transformed Clayton, the Frick family home on Penn Avenue, from an 11-room Italianate to a 23-room chateau-style mansion in the late 1800s and was the architect for a mix of other residences and landmark buildings all around western Pennsylvania.
We came upon our home in the middle of a top-to-bottom historical renovation being managed by Chuck Gianakas of Diggins Builders. Chuck, as it happens, lives two blocks over from us in Friendship, and is known for taking on one to two jobs like this per year, bringing early 20th century homes back to their glory. Since its 1904 construction, our home had led many lives and served many families, and at one point was broken up into six apartments.
The last family to live here lived out of only a few rooms, and the sole kitchen area was a space on the second floor leftover from one of the apartments. At the time we entered the design process, only the new kitchen cabinets had been purchased, which meant we got to choose the paint, tile, lighting, kitchen and bath finishings, window treatments, and every other little detail you could think of—an overwhelming but truly thrilling process. Our goal was to maintain as much of the historical character as we could while also making it livable and comfortable for a tech-loving family with a then 18-month old.
The property sits at the southeast corner of S. Atlantic and Friendship Avenues. The original stone wall that surrounds the house and continues down half a block on both S. Atlantic and S. Aiken Avenues denotes the original plot of land owned by George and Mary Wilson, who purchased the land with a residence fronting Rebecca Street (now S. Aiken) in 1880. In 1904, they commissioned Osterling to add five homes to the back of their property along S. Atlantic Ave. The construction cost of our corner home at the time was estimated at $8,000.
The Wilsons originally rented this row of five S. Atlantic Osterling homes to tenants, and our home’s tenants included Frank C. Smith, a hotel proprietor, and George W. Meredith, a wholesale liquor business owner. On the house tour, you’ll be able to see two original whiskey jugs in our bar area from Meredith’s distillery, which we were able to acquire on eBay shortly after moving in. If you dare, you’ll also be able to peek at two framed photos left behind by an early tenant, Dr. Robert V. Swanton, who was attending medical school at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1920s. One black-and-white photo shows Swanson’s graduating class; the other is his class surrounding a cadaver lying on a table for examination. These were found in a pile of discarded items left behind in the carriage house, which is now our one-car garage at the back of the property.
The first owner-occupants were the Hissrich family, who purchased the home in 1923 for $18,000 and continued to live here for 40 years. In 1963, the home sold again for $12,000, and then in 1999, the owners just before us purchased it for $70,000. It is not known exactly who owned it when it was broken up into apartments, but we continue to get mail addressed to Apartments 1 through 6 despite many attempts to nullify those additional addresses for the property.
Some of the most remarkable features of the 2017 restoration include the original stained glass on the 1st floor landing, which was pulled out, restored, and then reinstalled. The daughter of the previous owner stopped by one day and pointed out to us the single pane which is different: “That’s where I threw a baseball through the window,” she said. The first floor also features a new powder room, with wood paneling on the exterior that so perfectly blends with the original paneling in the foyer that you would never know it wasn’t original to the house. Three of the home’s six fireplaces also feature their original tile and mantels.
The neighborhood of Friendship itself has been through its own series of revivals. Once a trolley suburb, many of its larger homes were broken up into apartments in the 1970s and 1980s, and with that came an increase in crime rates and problems with absentee landlords. Earlier iterations of community groups in Friendship began working to buy corner properties and restore them to single-family homes, setting the tone for a new impression of the neighborhood for people who drove through, which helped crime rates slowly dwindle. The 2025 Friendship House Tour will feature a variety of homes that showcase how the area’s character has evolved over time and how residents today honor our neighborhood’s time capsule of various architectural styles while still making room for modern amenities.
When people ask me about Friendship, it’s often hard to put into words just how special of a neighborhood it is. I’ll tell them about how we had gifts of cookies and freshly grown zucchini left at our door when we first moved in, or about the truly incredible roster of neighborhood events that Friendship Community Group manages to host each year with an all-volunteer team. But the best way I usually sum it all up is to say that Friendship is the East End’s hidden gem. I hope you’ll take this opportunity to come see it for yourself on Oct. 5.
The Friendship House Tour will be from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5, from 11 am to 4 pm. Early-bird tickets are $30 until Sept. 15 and can be purchased at: www.friendship-pgh.org/housetour.