Father Pitt

Category: California-Kirkbride

  • A Hillside House in California-Kirkbride

    1102 Sunday Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    This splendidly restored house is in a kind of variant of the Second Empire style that must have seemed very modern when the architect drew it. It has the exuberantly eclectic boundary-crossing details that made Victorian architecture an adventure. Unlike the strict revivalists, Victorian architects like the unknown who designed this house did not consider themselves bound to a pedantically correct interpretation of one period. Unlike the modernists who came after the strict revivalists, the Victorians felt free to pillage their ideas from every historical period. The result could be an atrocity if the pillaging was done without taste, but with taste it could create complex compositions that were like nothing that had been seen before, but were nevertheless in internal harmony.

  • House with Storefront in California-Kirkbride

    House with storefront

    Some readers doubtless find neglected buildings depressing. And they are, but they are also enlightening. Neglect may preserve details that would have been replaced if the owner had prospered; and here we have a house, originally with a storefront, that keeps its wooden siding and wood trim when other frame houses nearby have long been shrouded in aluminum.

    House with storefront

    Note the neatly kept new houses built just a few years ago right next door. Calbride is very much a mixed-bag sort of neighborhood, but the trend is upward.

    Dormer
    Window
    Door
    House with storefront

  • Fifth United Presbyterian Church, California-Kirkbride

    Fifth United Presbyterian Church

    Here is another one of those churches with the sanctuary upstairs, which have become one of old Pa Pitt’s small obsessions. This is quite typical of its time: it was built in 1870, and it has all the usual marks of the typical Pittsburgh smaller church: the shallow-pitched roof, the walls divided into sections by simple pilasters, the date stone in the gable, the crenellations. It now belongs to Northside Common Ministries.

    Date stone, 1870
    Front of the church
    Fifth U. P. Church

  • Brighton Theater, California-Kirkbride

    Brighton Theater

    One of the most exuberantly gaudy Art Deco façades in Pittsburgh is in a neighborhood almost no one ever visits. Fortunately things are looking up in California-Kirkbride—or Calbride as it’s called by denizens—which was once a notoriously bad neighborhood. Restoration mania has taken root in the Old Allegheny Rows Historic District, spilling over from the Mexican War Streets and Allegheny West nearby. Meanwhile, this building is preserved by lucky economics: it houses a letter-carriers’ union and some other tenants who will keep it standing without spending the money to change its appearance significantly. According to comments on this page at Cinema Treasures, the theater was built in 1928, replacing an earlier Brighton Theater on Brighton Road (this one is on the parallel Brighton Place).

    Masks: two tragedy, one comedy

    The architect’s scheme called for three masks to decorate the central section, so we have one Comedy and two Tragedies. And don’t miss the thoroughly Art Deco elephants on the corners:

    Elephant head in terra cotta
    Brighton Theater

    Addendum: The architects were Rubin & Veshancy;1 the theater opened toward the end of 1928.2

    1. “Plan New Theater for Center Avenue,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, November 20, 1927. ↩︎
    2. “North Side’s Newest Playhouse to Open Soon,” Pittsburgh Press, November 4, 1928. ↩︎