Father Pitt

Category: Brookline

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
Downtown West Liberty
The borough of West Liberty included more than half of what is now Beechview and all of Brookline. West Liberty Avenue, as you might guess from its name, ran right down the middle of it. Today city planning maps make West Liberty Avenue the border between Beechview and Brookline, but it forms a distinct business corridor of its own.

The five-way intersection of West Liberty Avenue with Capital Avenue, Haddon Way, and Curranhill Avenue looked for a while as though it might become the core of a substantial neighborhood business district. Instead, West Liberty Avenue was taken over by the automobile business, becoming the second great automobile row in Pittsburgh (after Baum Boulevard). But these buildings remain as a little clot of neighborhood businesses among the car dealers.

In the picture above, the building at left with Slick’s Bar in it, which dates from about 1916, was designed by Charles Geisler, who at the time lived only a block up the hill from the construction site.¹ The red bricks at the top (with an initial E bolted into them) probably indicate where there was once a green-tiled overhang, one of Geisler’s favorite ornaments.

A little farther up Capital Avenue we find this building, now home to a cupcake shop. The simple ornament picked out in blond brick is typical of the era around and after the First World War.

On the other side of West Liberty Avenue, this building from about 1928 was designed by the architects Smart & Scheuneman.² For many years it has been home to a sewing-machine shop of the sort where they will not bat an eye if you bring them a hundred-year-old machine to work on.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

This frame building, probably dating to the early 1900s, has been neglected for a long time—long enough that it still has its wood siding and trim.
1. Source: Construction Record, February 26, 1916, p. 4. “Architect Charles R. Geisler, 1933 Warnock street, awarded to Harry Bupp, 1093 Wingate avenue, the contract for erecting a two-story brick veneered hollow tile store and apartment building on Capital avenue for Henry Anmann, 103 Capital Avenue. Cost $6,500.” As built, No. 101 has three floors instead of two. On the “1923” layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps. “E. Amman” [sic] appears as owner of no. 101. Warnock Street, where Mr. Geisler lived, is now Woodward. ↩︎
2. Source: “Bids Taken for New 19th Ward Building,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, October 9, 1927. “Bids have been taken for a store and apartment building at West Liberty avenue and Currant [sic] street, Nineteenth Ward, for Mrs. R. M. Ousler. Smart & Scheuneman are the architects.” “R. M. Oursler” is shown as owner of this and the older building next door on a plat map. ↩︎
December 24, 2024
Boulevard Theatre, Brookline

According to its page at Cinema Treasures, this theater opened as the Braverman in 1928, just at the beginning of the sound era, but was soon renamed the Boulevard Theatre. We can see multiple layers of renovations, the most significant of which happened in 1937, when it was given the Victor Rigaumont treatment. Mr. Rigaumont was Pittsburgh’s most prolific architect of neighborhood movie palaces, and indeed his works can still be found all over the Northeast. Here the Art Deco panels on the second floor are certainly his work. The later ground-floor treatment was beamed in from the parallel universe where Spock wears a beard. After the theater closed, this was used as a Cedars of Lebanon hall for some years. Now it is a nightclub belonging to the Beechview-based Las Palmas empire, which also includes half a dozen Mexican groceries, a restaurant, and a radio station.

Old Pa Pitt apologizes for the poor pictures. The sun was behind the building, and he had gone out with nothing but a phone in his pocket, not expecting to take pictures; then a delay in his other business left him with nothing to do for half an hour on Brookline Boulevard, one of his favorite commercial streets in the city.

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

September 4, 2024
Pitas Leaving the Oven at Pitaland, Brookline

Pitaland has been a fixture on Brookline Boulevard for decades now. It is a store where you can find all kinds of Lebanese specialties. It is a lunch counter with a national reputation. And it is a bakery supplying pitas to supermarkets and restaurants all over the Pittsburgh area. Here is where the pitas come from: sixteen seconds of pitas rolling out of the oven, all puffed up and steaming.

You can go to Wikimedia Commons for a full HD version of the video.

August 19, 2024
Old Frame Church in Brookline

There are a couple of interesting used-to-bes about this frame duplex in Brookline. First, it used to be St. Mark’s English Lutheran Church: it was built before 1910, when the neighborhood was first being developed. In 1929, the church moved several blocks away to a new stone building designed by O. M. Topp, and this was converted to a double house.

Second, although the building stands on Bodkin Street now, it used to be on Brookline Boulevard. It was not the building that moved, however: the street moved out from under it. Brookline Boulevard used to go down toward West Liberty Avenue in a straight line from the top of the hill, but the grade was too steep for streetcars, which were routed in their own right-of-way that made a long curve down the hill. When the streetcar line to Brookline was abandoned, the western section of Brookline Boulevard, from Pioneer to West Liberty Avenues, was routed over the abandoned streetcar right-of-way, and the old Brookline Boulevard was renamed Bodkin Street.

March 6, 2024