The colossal Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse and Transfer Company Buildings required streets to be closed and diverted to accommodate them. McKean Street was diverted and became a canyon through the complex. Here we see the bridge on which Terminal Way, the street that runs through and on top of the buildings, crosses McKean Street.
A North Side landmark for just about a century now, the Allegheny YMCA on North Avenue was designed by R. Maurice Trimble and built in 1926. It did not hide its light under a bushel: the letters YMCA are picked out in light bulbs at the top of the North Avenue façade.
A “hotel” in the common Pittsburgh sense had rooms for rent, but probably expected to make most of its money from the bar downstairs. The rooms were there because it was much easier to get a liquor license for a hotel than for a bar or restaurant. Both these hotels were on backstreet corners in Allegheny. Above, the Hotel Reeg at the corner of Tripoli (originally Third) Street and Middle Street.
We can just make out the ghosts of the letters that used to spell out “Hotel Reeg.” But it helped that old Pa Pitt was able to guess that it looked like a hotel, and that the name “Geo. Reeg” appears as property owner on old plat maps.
The Hotel Rahn, a block away at the corner of Suismon (originally Second) and Middle streets, is still very active. The rooms upstairs may be apartments now, but the restaurant and bar are a Dutchtown landmark: Max’s Allegheny Tavern, one of Pittsburgh’s top spots for German food.
For his entire career, Louis A. S. Bellinger was the only Black registered architect in western Pennsylvania. His most famous work today is the Pythian Temple, later the New Granada Theater, on the Hill. This is a much smaller project—a six-room house built in 1929 for a middle-class client.1 But the client got his money’s worth. It’s not a work of towering genius: it’s just the best house you could get for the money, designed by a man who knew how to take the ordinary Pittsburgh house and make it a little bit special.
The house is abandoned and overgrown, and it will probably not last much longer. It would take a miracle to save it—a miracle that made the location suddenly valuable, since it will require a nearly complete gutting to put the house back in livable shape. All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists now, so that future historians will know that Louis Bellinger made it.
It appears that the house originally had an open porch with an arched entrance; later most of the porch was closed in to make another room. The large window opening in front was a good bit larger when it was an open porch, as we can tell by the slight difference in mortar in the bricks to either side of the window.
Two rows of houses that have adapted to the trendy business atmosphere of South Craig Street. The row above has been adapted with minimal external modifications.
Since old Pa Pitt is a connoisseur of breezeways, he could not neglect this exceptionally fine example.
This row has been altered a bit more, though some care was taken to preserve its distinctive outlines.
Seen from Climax Street in Beltzhoover. Old Pa Pitt will disclose that there were bunches of utility cables in the way, but to make an idealized view of the building rather than the utility grid, he took them out. If there are blackouts in your idealized Beltzhoover, you know why.
We have many more pictures of St. George’s in another article.
Originally a building with five floors, built in 1886; a sixth floor was added in 1892 with considerable skill. We have more pictures of the building from two years ago; the picture above is a composite of six different photographs, so it is very big if you enlarge it.
A former bakery, now called “Birmingham Place,” between 23rd and 24th Streets on Carson Street. The adaptation was handled with good taste, preserving the attractive proportions of the building, including the huge windows that flood the place with natural light. According to the date at the top of the building, the main section was built in 1919; the section to the left was added after 1924, to judge by a Sanborn Fire Insurance map from that year on which the left wing does not appear.
