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?
Built in about 1925 (which is when this address starts appearing in the company’s advertisements), this was a warehouse for a prosperous moving company. Like most buildings along this stretch of West Liberty Avenue, it was later adapted to the car-dealing business.
The letter W for White appears in four cartouches on the front of the building.
Even a warehouse entrance ought to impress your customers, and that is what terra cotta is for.
A car dealer (selling Studebakers) was attached to the left side of the building; it has been replaced by a parking lot.
An unusually well-preserved commercial building in an eclectic style from the early twentieth century. The glass block in the stairwell doubtless marks where some more attractive art glass, which probably became a maintenance headache, would have been; and the blank panels above the storefronts were probably art glass as well (compare, for example, this other storefront on the same street). But the ground floor was never fussed with very much, and it still retains its stonework and inscription. The grey paint is not old Pa Pitt’s favorite treatment, but paint can be painted over.
The corner of West Liberty Avenue and Potomac Avenue is the center of the Dormont commercial district, and it is framed by two buildings that are very well suited for such a prominent location. The ground floor of the one above has been remodeled more than once, including what must have been an eye-catching moderne remodeling that left it with some rounded windows. The corner is marked with a turret, which is always good on a corner building. We suspect that the turret may have had a witch’s cap on top, but even without it the turret makes a good corner marker, accented with terra-cotta foliage around the top.
This building has a storefront with a proper corner entrance that has not been filled in, though the ground floor also appears to have been remodeled in the mid-twentieth-century moderne era.
