Father Pitt

Category: Bloomfield

  • St. John’s Lutheran Church, Bloomfield

    St. John’s Lutheran, Bloomfield

    This is on 40th Street in the end of Bloomfield that sticks like a thumb into Lower Lawrenceville. It is another of those city churches where the sanctuary is on the second floor, as we often find in dense rowhouse neighborhoods where the church must make the most of a tiny lot. Like many of those churches, it is now apartments.

    Addendum: According to a city database of historic buildings, the architect was Frederick Sauer, famous for attractive and competent Catholic churches and the strange flights of whimsy he built in his back yard in Aspinwall.

    St. John’s Lutheran
    St. John’s Lutheran
    Tower
    Choir Loft Condominiums

  • Wilson Drugs, Penn Main

    Wilson Pharmacy

    The district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street is commonly called Penn Main; it’s on the border of Lawrenceville and Bloomfield, and functions as a secondary commercial spine for both neighborhoods. Because the streets do not meet at a right angle, the buildings on the corner are various odd Pittsburgh shapes. This attractive commercial building is an irregular pentagon. Wilson Drugs, one of the diminishing number of independent neighborhood drug stores in the city, seems frozen in 1948, in spite of its electronic displays.

    Wilson Drugs

  • Pearl Street, Bloomfield

    Pearl Street

    The last rays of evening sun strike little rowhouses on Pearl Street in Bloomfield. This picture was taken in 1999, but except for the cars the view has changed very little. Bloomfield still has one of the city’s best collections of Kool Vent aluminum awnings.

  • Bloomfield in 1999

    Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield

    Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield, as it appeared in 1999. The picture was taken with an old folding Kodak Tourist camera.

  • West Penn Hospital

    Originally the Western Pennsylvania Hospital, but what was the nickname has become the official name in hospital literature. The side that faces Liberty Avenue is modern in an unimpressive way, but the side that faces Friendship Park is a landmark of hospital architecture. By stitching a large number of photographs together, we can get a picture of the whole building the way the architect imagined it.

  • First United Methodist Church

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare 1485 IS.

    Technically in Bloomfield, this church sits on the corner where Bloomfield, Shadyside, and Friendship come together. The architects, Weary & Kramer, were a firm from Akron that specialized in heavy Romanesque and Gothic. This church is obviously inspired by H. H. Richardson’s designs, especially his courthouse and his Trinity Church in Boston.

    According to the Architectural Record, this congregation used to be called Christ’s Methodist Church.

    Camera: Canon PowerShot S45.