These apartment buildings are a riot of patterns in bricks. Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about them other than what we see in the pictures, but he would not be surprised if they were designed by Charles R. Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed many other small and medium-sized apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, and who was fond of using patterned bricks for decoration.
Potomac Avenue is a good example of the suburban neighborhood business district of the early twentieth century, and one of the pleasantest shopping streets in the South Hills. Here are just a few of the storefronts.
The Spanish Mission style was especially popular in Dormont. To make a building Spanish Mission style, you put a tiled overhang along the top of the façade. Done. This building, incidentally, is still home to the Potomac Bakery, which as of this writing has been here for 99 years.
There was a time, not too long ago, when almost every neighborhood business district had a Murphy’s variety store. This one is now a pool hall, but it has changed very little on the outside.
This is the building at the corner of West Liberty Avenue and Potomac Avenue; we have pictures of the West Liberty Avenue end as well. It is decorated with conventional but pretty terra-cotta panels.
This would be a very ordinary double house if it were not for the way the front entrances are placed in a sort of modernistic tower, turning a simple brick box into a fantasy of the Home of the Future.
Some of the houses on the southeast side of Espy Avenue, which has perhaps Dormont’s best collection of domestic architecture, illuminated by the last golden rays of evening sun. We begin with the manse for the Dormont Presbyterian Church.
We have seen this double house before, which old Pa Pitt still thinks is a good example of how to fit higher-density housing into a pleasant residential neighborhood.
This building is about the same size as the houses on Glenmore Avenue, and it could easily pass for one of them. But a second glance makes it look a little less domestic and a little more institutional. And it has a cornerstone dating it to 1931, which is a very unusual detail for a private house.
Old Pa Pitt has walked past this building many times, and always meant to look into its history. His first guess was that it was a church, but in fact it was a high-toned women’s club where the female half of the cream of South Hills society met to plan schemes for the betterment of their community. A century ago we were a social nation of clubs and lodges and churches; today, almost all the clubs and lodges have disappeared, and the churches are struggling. But we have social media.
The building is now a training center for the Chartiers Center, an organization that helps adults with behavioral-health difficulties and intellectual and developmental disorders.
From a distance, we can see how densely built Dormont is. It’s in the top 1% of municipalities by population density in the United States. Yet the streets never feel crowded or claustrophobic. That pleasant and efficient use of land is the reason why Father Pitt, without any irony, likes to talk about the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development.
Espy Avenue is perhaps the highest-toned street in Dormont, lined with fine houses by distinguished architects. We’ve seen a bunch of them before; here are four from the other side of the street.
The beautiful birches make it a little hard to photograph the house behind; old Pa Pitt did the best he could.
A giant standing skeleton was very amusing when it was the first one on your block. It tends to stand around forever, because otherwise you have to figure out where to put it.
We’ve seen this double before, with the sun behind it. Here it is again in cloudy weather, when the details may be a little easier to see.
The northeastern end of Glenmore Avenue has some of Dormont’s finest houses, most of them obviously designed by architects with taste, though so far old Pa Pitt has failed to find any of their names. Here is an album from one block of Glenmore Avenue. We have more pictures from the next block of the street here and here.
An attractive and well-maintained building that would have been even more attractive when that overhang had green or red tiles. The style seems to hover somewhere between Renaissance and Arts and Crafts.
After the originally tiled overhang and its showy wooden brackets, the most eye-catching feature is the balconies with their bulging iron railings.
After months of work, the Hollywood, Dormont’s century-old neighborhood movie palace, is open again as the Row House Hollywood, showing an eclectic mixture of classic movies, cult films, and independent productions. As a rare undivided big-screen theater, the Hollywood is big enough to accommodate special performances, like a showing of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc with the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh.
Charles R. Geisler designed the original 1925 building (the Spanish Mission details are certainly his); Victor A. Rigaumont, Pittsburgh’s titan of Deco theaters, supervised a remodeling in 1948.
The Hollywood is an easy stroll from the Potomac station on the Red Line. There are also public parking lots nearby for the carbound, but isn’t half the fun of visiting a silent-era movie palace using a period-appropriate transit line to get there?
