Sauer Buildings Historic District

Set on a steep wooded hillside in Aspinwall, the Sauer Buildings are a group of houses, apartments, garages, walls and paths assembled by Frederick C. Sauer, a Pittsburgh-area architect and builder. Work began with his own house and carriage house of buff brick around 1900. From 1928 to 1930 he rebuilt a former chicken coop as the Heidelberg apartment building, and he continued adding structures until his death in 1942. The buildings use concrete and concrete block, faced with jagged stone quarried on site, and decorated with salvaged terra cotta including a lion mask and a relief of Benjamin Franklin. Each floor of the Heidelberg is reached from ground level because the building is set into the slope. The district is valued for its unusual, self-directed design, which departs from the conventional styles Sauer used in his public commissions. Its interiors, walls and landscape features together form a single unified image of the hillside.