monroevillehistorical.org

Valley Tower in 2006

Valley Tower, 1939

1397 Abers Creek Road

 This impressive house was built on what was for many years the farm of John and Tillie Richards along Abers Creek Road.   After the old farmhouse was torn down in the late 1930s, Charles Ross Anthony commissioned this house as his residence from renown architect Henry Hornbostel.

            The architectural plan called for three stacked units (each containing a bedroom and bath).  Also on the ground floor was a small kitchen and a wing for the housekeeper. Mr. Anthony, for many years a bachelor, had his bedroom on the ground floor, and after he was married in 1951, his wife Lillian had her bedroom on the second floor, the third floor bedroom would eventually be their son’s.  The Anthony family lived in the house until 1998, when it was sold to the current owners, the Leases. 

            Built in the Norman Revival style, the house’s stark design and lack of ornamentation, evokes the rugged simplicity of a Norman Keep.   It sits nestled beside a wooded hill, near Abers Creek where it seems secure; comfortable in its natural surroundings having been constructed using the original tan and brown stones taken from Bill Malise’s abandoned sawmill, which stood nearby.

 Originally from New York, Henry Hornbostel gained much of his reputation from work he did in the Pittsburgh area.  Most notable were his contributions to the original campus of Carnegie Mellon University (then Carnegie Technical Schools), in Oakland, in the early 1900s.  In the following decades many of the Oakland’s most distinguished buildings were also to be his designs.   Although better known for his monumental public architecture, Hornbostel designed a number of private homes in the Pittsburgh area, including this one, said to have been among this last and finest.