It might look better with a little paint, but this commercial building preserves some interesting details that might have disappeared if its owners had been more prosperous
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Commercial Building on Fifth Avenue, Coraopolis
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
A Stroll on Mill Street in Coraopolis
Kodak Pony 135 with Kentmere Pan 100 film (monobath developed). The main business streets of Coraopolis are Fifth Avenue, Fourth Avenue, and Mill Street, a very narrow street that crosses the other two. (There is also a Main Street in Coraopolis, but, in Pittsburghish fashion, it is not the main street.) Let’s take a stroll down Mill Street together. We’ll take two cameras with us, one digital and the other loaded with black-and-white film.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. We’ll start at the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company building, a splendid bank designed by Press C. Dowler, who gave us a number of grand classical banks. Right across Fifth Avenue is…
…another grand classical bank, the Ohio Valley Trust Company. This one is still in use as a bank.
This plain but dignified doorway leads to the upstairs offices, which were a prestigious address for local businessmen. The architect W. E. Laughner had his office here.
Across the street is a substantial commercial block with a corner entrance.
Now we come to a building with tangled layers of history, but enough remains to show us the style of the original.
This bricked-in arch has a terra-cotta head for a keystone. Note that the original building was faced with Roman brick—the long, narrow bricks you see outside the arch—and not just Roman, but yellow Kittanning Roman brick.
This building next door used similar Kittanning Roman brick. The storefront has been altered, but long enough ago that it has an inset entrance to keep the door from hitting pedestrians in the face.
At the intersection with Fourth Avenue we meet the old Hotel Helm,1 with its distinctive shingled turret. It probably bore a cap when it was built.
From here Mill Street leads past the train station and the Fingeret building, both of which we’ve seen before. At Second Avenue—as far as we’ll go for now—we come to…
…the Hotel Belvedere, which was probably a cheaper place to stay than the Hotel Helm. It still preserves its shingled gable, though the rest has been sheathed in three colors of fake siding.
- Some of our information comes from 1924 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps at the Library of Congress. ↩︎
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Shingly Victorian in Coraopolis
This frame house across from the train station is a feast of Victorian woodwork, lovingly picked out in a tasteful polychrome paint scheme.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
C. H. Fingeret Building, Coraopolis
Father Pitt knows nothing about this building besides what you see here. It was probably a striking Moderne design when it went up in 1943; paint has obscured the patterned brickwork and different materials.
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Ohio Valley Trust Company, Coraopolis
As seen by a Kodak Pony 135 camera with Efke KB 25 film. The film expired years ago—or rather the printed expiration date was years ago, but the film lives on. Once this roll (which started at 30.5 meters) is gone, however, there is no more. The creaky old Efke factory in Croatia closed down in 2012 on account of “a fatal breakdown in machinery.” The current incarnation of ADOX picked up the formula for Efke’s ISO 100 film, but not this slower film. It’s a pity, because this film produced negatives with fine grain and a wide range of tones, and it was also cheap.
We also have pictures of the Ohio Valley Trust Company building in color.
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Progress on the Coraopolis Station
Designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, probably the one firm with the best claim to the title of successors of H. H. Richardson, this station sat derelict for years. After a fundraising campaign, it is being restored as the Coach Fred Milanovich Center for Community Connection. We last saw it in July, and since then a good bit has been accomplished. Workers were busy today when old Pa Pitt came by.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The old freight depot is altered but still standing.
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First Baptist Church, Coraopolis
Though the renovations with modern materials—understandable for a congregation on a tight budget—have not always been sympathetic, this is still a valuable relic of the era of Victorian frame Gothic churches. As Pittsburgh and its suburbs prospered in the twentieth century, most of those churches were replaces with bigger and brickier structures, so although these churches were once all over western Pennsylvania, remnants like this are fairly rare. This one no longer serves the Baptist congregation (or the Anglican congregation that inhabited it more recently), but some maintenance work seems to be going on.
The distinctive wooden belfry is still in good shape, though missing a few pieces of trim and wanting a bit of paint. The trim is simple and could be replicated in somebody’s garage woodshop.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Second Presbyterian Church, Coraopolis
Now the Church of God, this is a modest church in an abstract version of Perpendicular Gothic, with castle-like battlemented towers fore and aft. The stained glass has been removed, possibly because it was too decrepit to restore, or possibly to satisfy the iconoclastic tendencies of American Evangelicalism.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Coraopolis Junior High School
Edward Stotz, who also designed Fifth Avenue High School and Schenley High School (the country’s first million-dollar high school), was the architect of this staid and respectable school, now turned into apartments.
The inscription over the door was hand-painted by someone with a distinctive idea of quotation marks.
Kodak EasyShare Z981. 
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company
Press C. Dowler, prolific architect of schools, banks, and telephone exchanges, designed this solid-looking classical bank, and the Pittsburgh Daily Post tells us that the opening (October 10, 1021) was a gala occasion.
The building no longer houses a bank, but almost nothing about the exterior has changed since that opening day, except that the big windows may not originally have been filled in with glass block.
A look down the Mill Street side of the bank, with the Ohio Valley Trust Company building in the background.
Mill Street does not meet Fifth Avenue at exactly a right angle, which leaves room for this curious triangular pit with a basement entrance.
A lantern on the front of the building.
A picture on a sunny day.
