While looking at old plat maps for information about some of the buildings he had photographed in Allentown, Father Pitt noticed a commercial bakery in the narrow back streets. In the satellite view, it was still there, so naturally old Pa Pitt had to see it the next time he was in Allentown. It is now inhabited by a real-estate company and a maker of hand-crafted candles.
The Limbach Building is a good representative of what has been going on in Allentown over the past few years. Allentown was traditionally a German neighborhood, and the Limbach Building is a well-preserved example of the style old Pa Pitt calls German Victorian. Above we see it as it was just a few days ago; below in July of 2021. The building is in better shape now, and the downstairs tenant—a gym called “Death Comes Lifting,” whose slogan is “Fitness for the Misfits”—is weirder. Thus the whole progress of the Allentown business district is epitomized in one building: better and weirder.
It is especially cheering to see that someone is taking good care of the distinctive dome on the turret. The building would lose half its German flavor without that detail.
Old Pa Pitt is also happy that the corner entrance has never been filled in.
All summer long, all the rail routes have been detoured through Allentown. Stop and consider for a moment how thoroughly odd Pittsburgh transit is: do you know of any other subway system that keeps up an alternate route over the top for times when one of the tunnels has to be closed?
The few riders who look up from their phone screens have a chance to notice that Allentown is changing. Over the past few years, the Warrington Avenue business district has been going through a rapid trendification. It’s full of weird little shops too low-budget for the high rents of Lawrenceville.
A bonus bus coming toward you, for the longtime fans.
While the trolleys are going over the top, they stop at Allen Street in the middle of the Allentown business district.
Many people in Allentown would like to have their Allentown Trolley back permanently. They have been enjoying their summer of streetcars.
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.
Built in 1928, this Tudor firehouse was designed by Richard Neff, and it is one of the most charming public buildings in the Hilltop neighborhoods. It is now a paramedic station. A few years ago, the city spiffed up its historic firehouses, so this one looks almost new now.
There are countless pictures in Father Pitt’s archives that are not good enough to publish, but every once in a while he realizes that he has forgotten to publish a perfectly adequate one. He went looking for his article on this church in Allentown because he had just identified the architect, and the article was nowhere to be found. So here it is, almost a year after the picture was taken. The architect was E. V. Dennick, as we learn from The Construction Record in 1915: “Architect E. V. Denick, 1212 House Building, is taking bids on erecting a one-story and basement brick and sandstone church on Excelsior Street, Allentown, for the Bethlehem Lutheran Congregation.” (On another page of the same magazine, the architect’s name is spelled “Denick,” and it is usually spelled that way in other listings.)
From the front this appears to be another one of our churches with the sanctuary upstairs, but the building is set into the hill, and therefore justifies the magazine’s description as “one-story and basement.”
You walk up Walter Street past the usual Hilltop cacophony of vernacular houses with aluminum and vinyl siding, and then suddenly you come upon this explosion of Art Nouveau. The building has lost its balconies (a long time ago, to judge by that tattered aluminum awning) and its cornice, but it retains its utter uniqueness, right down to the balcony doors to nowhere on the second and third floors, which appear to be original and designed specifically for this building rather than ordered from a catalogue.
This strange and wonderful little building is obviously the work of a strange and wonderful architect. But which one? It was built after 1903 but before 1910, and we are sorely tempted to attribute it to Titus de Bobula, whose entire Pittsburgh career blossomed and faded in that period. The treatment of the decorations strongly reminds old Pa Pitt of the Everett Apartments in Shadyside—in fact the decorations are so similar that Father Pitt is nearly convinced they have to be by the same architect. He is not the only one to notice the similarity. A city architecture inventory (PDF) also points it out: “Its similarity to another apartment building in the East End (at Ellsworth Avenue and Copeland Street in Shadyside) further sets the design of 404 Walter apart from the local vernacular found throughout the rest of Allentown.”
To see what both Father Pitt and the city’s architecture experts are talking about, consider these decorations:
Now compare this decoration from the Everett in Shadyside:
The similarity is certainly marked; many of the pieces are identical. Since the Everett is attributed to Titus de Bobula, we are justified in saying that he is a strong possibility for this one, too.
Another De Bobulesque feature is the lack of a main entrance: instead there is a small door off to one side that appears to lead into a stairwell. This is also the case with his Glen Tenement House in Hazelwood and with the Everett. The narrow verticals with asymmetrically staggered windows remind us of St. Michael’s School in Braddock, another De Bobula design (Father Pitt promises to make a pilgrimage to Braddock soon and come back with pictures).
Father Pitt will regard this as a De Bobula building until someone proves otherwise. But he would be delighted to have someone prove otherwise, because then he would be introduced to another eccentric but talented architect.
A Romanesque church whose immense chimney dwarfs its stubby little tower, this is probably the only church in the neighborhood still serving its original congregation.
A particularly fine Art Deco design. Neighborhood telephone exchanges were put up all over the city, and the telephone company, which had all the money in the world, always made them ornaments to their neighborhoods. This one still belongs to the successor of the Bell Telephone Company.
Addendum: The architect was almost certainly Press C. Dowler. According to the Pennsylvania Historic Resource Survey Form for the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building, “Between 1935 and 1955, Press C. Dowler designed in excess of 60 buildings for Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania in the Pittsburgh region.”
One of our endangered landmarks: it has been closed as a church for six years now, and no one seems to know what else to do with it. A community group wants to preserve it as a community resource, but it takes money to keep up a magnificent church. Allentown seems to be metamorphosing into a trendy neighborhood, but not very quickly into an expensive neighborhood—which is a good thing for the residents, but a bad thing for the prospect of making anything profitable out of this building.
Allentown was a German neighborhood, and this church was designed by a German architect (Herman J. Lang) for a German congregation. The church was finished in 1912. It has its own Wikipedia article, which identifies it as an example of “the German Romanesque architectural style, an American derivative of the Rundbogenstil style.” Father Pitt approves of that description, because he likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.” We have pillaged most of the rest of our information from that article.
