Father Pitt

Category: Brookline

Paul Presbyterian Church, Brookline

Paul Presbyterian Church, built in 1923, was named not for the Apostle Paul, as you might suppose, but for Elizabeth Paul, who donated the land on which the church was built along with $1,000 toward the cost of the building. After the congregation dissolved in 2001, the building passed to the Providence Reformed Presbyterian congregation. Now it belongs to Freedom Fellowship Church of Pittsburgh.

The amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site has a long history of Paul Presbyterian Church, all written in bold Comic Sans, like the rest of the site.

Stained glass with a depiction of Christ as Good Shepherd was in the front windows until the Reformed Presbyterians took over. The windows needed expensive repair, and, according to the Brookline Connection article, “with this being a rather conservative Presbyterian denomination, displaying the image of Jesus above God ran contrary to the First Commandment, and replacing them was more in line with their beliefs”—a weirdly Arian argument that we hope was garbled in transmission.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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September 7, 2025
Brookline War Memorial

The Brookline war memorial sits in a little triangular park formed by the curve of Brookline Boulevard meeting Chelton Avenue and Queensboro Avenue. The cannon is placed in position to repel invaders from Dormont and Beechview.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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August 29, 2025
Spanish Mission Style on Brookline Boulevard

Yesterday we looked at the Spanish Mission style in Dormont. One of the adjacent city neighborhoods, Brookline, is also stuffed with Spanish Mission commercial buildings along Brookline Boulevard. Again, we look for tiled overhangs (although often the tiles have been replaced with asphalt shingles) held up by exaggerated brackets.

This building was the Brookline Theatre, a silent-era neighborhood movie house.

The building above and the one below both bear dates of 1926, and they share some similar design ideas—though the one above has slated instead of tiled overhangs.

Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

An abstract and geometric form of the style, but the overhang was probably tiled originally, and it probably had brackets before it was rebuilt.

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August 12, 2025
Frank H. Mazza Pavilion, Brookline

The challenge: take a 1970s Brutalist retirement home that seemed to interrupt the neighborhood streetscape of Brookline Boulevard and re-imagine it as something bright and welcoming that would fit with the little one-off shops that make up the rest of the Boulevard. Rothschild Doyno Collaborative responded in 2011 with this design, whose muted but varied colors, large windows, and human-scaled ground floor seem at home on the street, whereas the previous incarnation of the building seemed to loom menacingly.

Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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August 5, 2025
A Marble House in Brookline? Well, Almost…

The white facing blocks of this house set it apart from its neighbors, and from most other houses in Pittsburgh. Are they stone? Are they concrete? Well, mostly concrete, but a bit of both.

When the house was going up, it attracted some attention for its novel material. From the Gazette Times, December 20, 1914:

MARBLE DUST WITH CEMENT.

New Brookline House Discloses Novelty in Material Used.

A house nearing completion in Brookline, attracting much attention, is the home being erected by Mrs. Mary M. Otterman, on Berkshire avenue, near Castlegate avenue. Its construction is hollow tile, veneered on the outside with white “marble” blocks. These blocks are made on the premises by the use of a molding machine, the material used being white cement and marble dust. While this method of construction is not expensive, it has a very beautiful effect. The white “marble” walls, with rich brown trim and colored roof, make it one of the most attractive homes in the South Hills. The property is being visited dally by architects, contractors and prospective builders and no doubt many “marble” veneer houses will be built around Pittsburgh in the early spring.

Well, it’s surprising how few of these “marble” houses we do see around Pittsburgh. It may be that architects and contractors missed out on a good idea. Here it is, 111 years later, and the “marble” blocks are still in perfect shape.

Olympus E-20N.

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July 10, 2025
Modernistic Double House in Brookline

“God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, and the details that would have refined the style of this double house have been lost: windows have been replaced, a hipped roof (invisible from this angle) replaced the original flat roof about six years ago, and we suspect that the porch railings and aluminum canopies are not original. Even so, we can see enough to see that this was an interestingly modern construction when it went up, probably in the late 1930s or the 1940s. The corner windows were a badge of modernity.

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July 8, 2025
Mr. Cooley Builds His Dream House

C. D. Cooley, an architect who was associated with the Bartberger brothers for a while in the firm of Bartberger, Cooley & Bartberger, built this home for himself in the newly accessible suburb of Brookline, which had suddenly become an easy commute from downtown Pittsburgh when the Transit Tunnel opened. It is a beautiful house even now, little altered from Mr. Cooley’s vision, and it stands out from its more pedestrian neighbors as a work of unusual taste.

But tragedy struck the Cooley family. In 1915, Mrs. Cooley died. She was only thirty years old.¹ About half a year later, Mr. Cooley put the house up for sale.

Pittsburg Press, March 23, 1916.

“Built by Pittsburg architect for home at cost of $9,000, but, owing to death in family will sacrifice to quick buyer.”

We might add that the building cost of $9,000 might have been twice the cost of neighboring houses in Brookline. The house was not huge, but by Brookline standards it was luxurious, with expensive materials—stone instead of brick, and oak where neighboring houses would have had cheap yellow pine.

Father Pitt loves chimney pots, and these simple rectangular ones are perfectly matched to the style of the house.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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July 2, 2025
Ritz Apartments, Brookline

Perhaps not quite as ritzy as they would be in another neighborhood, but for prosperous working-class Brookline this is a fine building. The stone-fronted ground floor is topped by two floors of stone-colored white Kittanning brick, making a rich impression; and clever little decorations made from what look like terra-cotta remnants brighten what might otherwise be a monotonous façade.

Nikon COOLPIX P100

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April 18, 2025
Brookline Theatre

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

The Brookline Theatre on Brookline Boulevard in Brookline was a typical neighborhood movie house of the silent era. According to Ed Blank, the well-known newspaper critic, who has made a thorough study of Pittsburgh movie houses, it opened on March 28, 1921. It ceased to show movies about half a century ago, and since then has had a varied career as a thrift shop, a bar, and currently a sports bar with two competing cell-phone dealers. The Mission style of the building, with its tiled overhang and exaggerated wooden brackets, was popular in the 1920s, especially in the South Hills neighborhoods.

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April 11, 2025
Resurrection School, Brookline
John T. Comès, perhaps Pittsburgh’s greatest contribution to ecclesiastical architecture, designed this school in 1909.¹ As often happened in growing parishes, it was meant to serve as the church as well until a bigger sanctuary could be built (which finally happened in 1939). The upper floor was added in 1912, and wings (invisible from the front) were added after Comès died by the Kauzor Brothers, one of whom had briefly been Comès’ partner. Today the school has been turned into retirement apartments without much change to the exterior.

Canon PowerShot SX150IS.
1. Source: A very thorough Chronology of Resurrection Parish published in 1934. ↩︎
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March 14, 2025