The residential portion of the Schenley Farms National Register of Historic Places District is the vision of Franklin F. Nicola, who purchased the land from Mary Schenley's estate in 1903.
Architecturally, the District is an archive of early twentieth-century revival residential styes designed by prominent Pittsburgh architects such s Alden & Harlow, Thorsten Billquit, Henry Hornbostel, Ingham & Boyd, Janssen & Abbot, Kiehnel & Elliott, Maximilian Nirdlinger, Rutan & Russel, Louis S. Stevens, Vrydaugh & Wolfe, and here The Twentieth Century Club, George H. Schwan, 1910, encapsulated and enlarged by Janssen & Cocken, 1929-1930.
The streets are named for American and British romantic literary figures--Francis Parkman, Edward Lytton, and Alfred Tennyson. A wide boulevard, typical of City Beautiful planning, separates the residences from the prestigious array of educational cultural, and institutional buildings in the adjacent Oakland Civic Center City of Pittsburgh Historic District. This unusual blending of urban and suburban qualities, within an impressive architectural context, makes Schenley Farms a significant document of early twentieth-century.