Father Pitt

Category: Beltzhoover

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
House by Louis Bellinger in Beltzhoover
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.

Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
1. Source: The Charette, January, 1929, p. 12. “602. Architect: Louis A. S. Bellinger, 525 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: Robert T. Smith. Title: One family dwelling, six rooms and bath. Location: 85 Sylvania Ave. Contract awarded to Vincent Mingers. Contract price: $8700.00.” ↩︎
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March 20, 2025
Beltzhoover Presbyterian Church

Since 1969 this has been the home of South Hills Baptist Church, but it was originally Presbyterian. It is a tidy and well-kept example of a small corner-tower church from the late 1800s or very early 1900s, modest but very tasteful, combining Romanesque style with the Arts-and-Crafts trend of the 1890s. Fortunately the current congregation has maintained it in beautiful and original shape.

August 17, 2022
Beltzhoover Sub-District School

This picture was made from 15 separate photographs, so be aware that it will be about 18 megabytes of data if you enlarge it.

Built in 1909, this is a grand classical schoolhouse with a distinctive tower; except for the tower, we can imagine it as an English earl’s house from the 1600s. The architects were William J. Shaw and Thomas Lloyd. The school has been abandoned for years, but there is hope now of turning it into apartments. In the huge picture above, note the way the building defies the typically Pittsburghish slope of the street. In fact it sits on a mound in the middle of the block, and you need some legs to get up to it from any direction.

August 13, 2022