Category: Brookline

  • Ritz Apartments, Brookline

    Ritz Building

    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.

    Cornice
    Terra-cotta diamonds
    Nikon COOLPIX P100

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  • Brookline Theatre

    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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  • Resurrection School, Brookline

    Resurrection School

    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.

    Entrance
    Entrance
    Date stone: A. D. 1909
    Resurrection School
    Cornerstone
    Cornerstone: Anno Domini 1909
    Resurrection School
    Rear of the school
    Canon PowerShot SX150IS.
    1. Source: A very thorough Chronology of Resurrection Parish published in 1934. ↩︎

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  • Downtown West Liberty

    101 and 103 Capital Avenue

    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.

    Capitol Avenue at West Liberty Avenue

    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.

    190 Capital Avenue

    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.

    109 Capital Avenue
    109 Capital Avenue
    1828 West Liberty Avenue

    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.

    1828 West Liberty Avenue
    1826 West Liberty Avenue
    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. ↩︎
  • Boulevard Theatre, Brookline

    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.

    Insomnia nightclub
    Boulevard Theatre
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • 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.

  • Old Frame Church in Brookline

    Old St. Mark’s

    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.

    Looking up the steps
    403 and 405 Bodkin Street
  • Fire Tower in Brookline

  • Abandoned Houses Along Saw Mill Run

    Abandoned house from the 1880s

    We saw these houses a little while ago in pictures taken with a cheap cell-phone camera and in poor lighting. Since the houses will probably not be here forever, old Pa Pitt went back to document them in more even light with a more capable camera. These are the last remnants of a little village along Saw Mill Run, connected to the other side by the one-lane Timberland Avenue bridge. The one with the green siding above dates from the 1880s, the one below from the 1890s, according to the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site. Obviously they had substantial alterations during their lifetimes, but we can still recognize them in this picture from 1909 at the Brookline Connection site.

    1890s house
    Both houses
  • Grace Lutheran Church, Brookline

    Grace Lutheran Church

    Since 1959 this has been Pittsburgh Baptist Church, our first Southern Baptist congregation. But it was built in 1908 as a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, Grace Lutheran. It is perhaps Brookline’s most striking church, built in a unique variant of the Arts-and-Crafts Tudor Gothic style that was popular then. The massing of the forms is particularly pleasing.

    Pittsburgh Baptist Church
    Grace Lutheran, originally

    Addendum: The architect was John A. Long, as we discover in the Construction Record, September 16, 1911: “Martsolf Brothers, House building, have secured contract for the erection of a two-story cement stucco church and parsonage, on Pioneer avenue, Brookline, for the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation. Architect John A. Long, Machesney building, prepared the plans.”