Father Pitt

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Three Buildings from the 1880s on Shiloh Street, Mount Washington

Some day some clever inventor will patent a way to match mortar colors in brickwork and make a fortune. (That was sarcasm, by the way: it can be done, but first you have to realize that it ought to be done.) Nevertheless, this building looks much better than it did a few years ago, when the front was covered with aluminum, fake stone, and asphalt shingles. Was it absolutely necessary to brick in all the side windows? Well, probably. Otherwise light might leak in. The original building comes from the 1880s, and the basic outline of it remains Victorian Gothic.

This building also seems to have been put up in the 1880s, or possibly as early as the 1870s. It has been so thoroughly remodeled so often that it would be hard to guess what it looked like originally; Father Pitt’s best guess would be that it had a Second Empire mansard roof and details, replaced in the 1970s by the parody of a Second Empire roof we see today. In the past two decades, the ground floor has been completely redesigned twice; the current incarnation is better than the way it looked twenty years ago.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

Here is a Second Empire building that retains much of its original detail, in spite of the complete remodeling of the ground floor (the original design probably let in far too much natural light) and the artificial siding on the dormers.

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March 28, 2025
Dormont Village

This composite picture is very big if you enlarge it.

Old Pa Pitt’s unending mission is to help the people of Pittsburgh and surroundings see the things they pass right by without seeing. So here is a strip mall. You drive right past it without thinking that there could possibly be anything interesting about it, but this is in fact one of the pioneer strip malls in the Pittsburgh area. It was built in 1940 to a design by Thomas Benner Garman, a Mount Lebanon architect most of whose work was in traditional houses for the upper middle classes. When he designed commercial buildings, though, he adopted a decidedly modern style.

The key to his architectural ambidexterity was his sense of context. “Nature,” he said in 1956, “has a law that fits architecture—namely: Avoid the grotesque and unseemly.”¹ What fits a street of suburban homes is not what fits a commercial thoroughfare.

The new Dormont Shops were promoted as a “drive-in one-stop shopping center,” a place where the suburban motorist would have the luxury of parking right out in front of the stores to do all the week’s shopping in one place. From the Pittsburgh Press, April 7, 1940:

The drive-in one-stop shopping center being erected on W. Liberty Ave., Dormont, is nearing completion.

The $250,000 building will be 250 feet long and 75 feet deep. It is set back about 80 feet from the street to provide parking space.

Frank H. Opferman, South Hills contractor, is the owner and builder. J. D. Marshall, real estate broker, is the exclusive rental agent. Thomas B. Garman was the architect.

Site of the building is the historic Fetterman homestead, one of Dormont’s landmarks. The razed house was more than 100 years old.

Old Pa Pitt will do the developers and Mr. Garman the justice to note that the “historic Fetterman homestead” had been butchered long before it was razed for this project. It had spent the last few decades as an apartment building, with various ramshackle additions.

Although the shopping center has been remodeled more than once, we can still get some idea of its original features. The arrangement was typical of the first generation of what we now call “strip malls”: it had two floors, with the main shops on the ground floor and miscellaneous businesses—including, until very recently, a bowling alley—upstairs. (Yes, you could hear the bowling going on in the shops downstairs.) The crest right in the middle of the building, which marks the entrance to the second floor, retains some of its Art Deco massing.

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March 27, 2025
FNB Financial Center

Our newest skyscraper, with a bonus bus coming toward you and a reflection of the Gulf Building. Opened just last year in 2024, this is the sixteenth-tallest skyscraper in Pittsburgh and the second-tallest outside downtown, after the Cathedral of Learning. It was designed by Gensler, the world’s largest architecture factory, which was also responsible for the Tower at PNC Plaza. Old Pa Pitt cannot help feeling that the Tower at PNC Plaza got the A unit at Gensler, whereas this one got the C unit. But it is an attempt, after sixty years, to fulfill the promises of redevelopment that were made when the Lower Hill was cleared.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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March 27, 2025
Overbrook Municipal Building

Overbrook was one of the last boroughs to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh. In 1929, when it was still independent, it built this fine all-in-one municipal building from a design by architect Louis Stevens, who is best remembered for houses for the rich and the upper middle class but also designed most of the public buildings for the borough of Overbrook. As far as old Pa Pitt knows, the building still belongs to the city of Pittsburgh, which has used it for various purposes over the years. It has been sensitively renovated and seems to have a secure future.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

In seventeen and a half years of articles, this is the first time old Pa Pitt has published one about Overbrook. It just goes to show how much more there is to do. Even another seventeen and a half years will not come near to finishing the job, so Father Pitt will just have to keep working.

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March 27, 2025
Row of Houses on Charles Street, Knoxville

This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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March 27, 2025
Daffodils

In Bird Park, Mount Lebanon.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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March 26, 2025
No Tap-Dancing in Rooms After 9 p.m.

The Hotel Roosevelt, as it appeared in a 1928 advertisement in the National Vaudeville Artists Year Book. The advertisement was designed to appeal to performers on the vaudeville circuit (which was just about to come crashing down and would be nearly extinct in five years), and it was certainly a convenient location, within a block’s walk of at least five theaters. The Roosevelt still stands today, converted to apartments, and it is still surrounded by theaters.

The ad carries the name of L. Fred Klooz, President and Managing Director, and it includes a bit of doggerel so awful that we can only presume it was written by Mr. Klooz himself.

March 26, 2025
Mellon Bank Building

Also known as the Mellon–U. S. Steel Building (it was the headquarters of U. S. Steel before the bigger U. S. Steel Building was put up) and now by its street address, 525 William Penn Place.

Harrison & Abramovitz, who did more than any other single firm to shape the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh, were the architects of this slab of metal and glass. It was their first project here; construction started in 1949, and the building opened in 1951. In “The Stones of Pittsburgh,” James D. Van Trump describes it with effective economy: “Large cage-slab with stainless steel sheathing. Envelope characterized by a kind of elegant monotony.”

There is a little blurring in the middle of this composite picture, which old Pa Pitt was not patient enough to try to correct when it came out of the automatic stitcher that way.

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March 25, 2025
Keech Block

This picture has been manipulated on two planes to match the perspective of the 1889 image below. It is no longer possible to stand in exactly the same place, because other buildings have sprouted in inconvenient places.

W. H. Keech was a dealer in furniture and carpets. In the 1880s he built this towering six-floor commercial palace on Penn Avenue at Garrison Place in the furniture district. The main part of the building has hardly changed since the photograph below was published in Pittsburgh Illustrated in 1889:

Probably in the 1890s, an addition was put on the right-hand side of the building, matching the original as well as possible.

This building is festooned with decorative details in just the right places, including some Romanesque carved stone above the entrance. (Addendum: The architect of the original building and additions, including one to the right later destroyed by fire and another one after that, was James T. Steen, according to a plaque on the Conover Building three doors down, which was originally part of the expanded Keech Block.)

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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March 25, 2025
Folk Art in a Gable in Beltzhoover

Here is an exceptionally fine example of a decorated gable in a house built in the 1880s.¹ The house is a rare survivor in Pittsburgh, where almost every frame house has long since been sheathed in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone.

Folk art is notoriously perishable; what is valuable is valuable precisely because there is so little of it left compared to what has been thrown out as worthless. Decorating houses with woodwork was one outlet for the artistic instinct that gave the work more than usual permanence, and in neglected neighborhoods we can still find some of these decorations in houses that have been kept up but not improved with fake siding. Whether the decorations were hand-carved or turned out by the hundreds as stock designs from a lumber mill, they represent an important branch of folk art—designs that stand outside the main stream of academic art, but stand within a long vernacular tradition of decoration.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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March 25, 2025