Father Pitt

Category: Dormont

  • Apartment Buildings on Voelkel Avenue, Dormont

    Weber Apartments 2

    On the southeast side of Voelkel Avenue in Dormont are three eye-catching apartment buildings. Since patterned brickwork was a favorite trick of Charles R. Geisler, the most prolific designer of apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, old Pa Pitt suspects he was responsible (but of course would be happy to be contradicted by someone with real information). The building above has kept its original art glass in the stairwell, but the front windows of the apartments have been replaced with modern picture windows.

    Weber and D’Alo Apartments
    Weber Apartments

    This one has a different configuration of apartment windows, possibly more like the original. It has lost its art glass in the stairwell, however.

    D’Alo Apts.

    The entrance to the D’Alo, on the corner of Voelkel and Potomac Avenues.

    2910 Voelkel Avenue
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    Across the street are two smaller apartment buildings with a similar riot of patterned brick. We suspect Geisler has struck again.

  • Stevenson Stop on the Red Line, Dormont

    Trolley arriving at Stevenson stop

    In the terminology of Pittsburgh Regional Transit, Stevenson is a “stop” rather than a “station,” meaning that you board from the low-level door—the one old Pa Pitt calls the “Pittsburgh door”—and walk up three steps, whereas at a “station” you enter by one of the platform-level doors.

  • Two Apartment Building on Potomac Avenue, Dormont

    1697 Potomac Avenue
    1697 Potomac Avenue

    One of these two apartment buildings was almost certainly designed by architect Charles Geisler for the developer Oscar Larson, and old Pa Pitt is inclined to think that both of them are Geisler’s work. Charles Geisler lived nearby in Beechview, and Dormont and Mount Lebanon are peppered with buildings he designed. These fit his style—patterned brickwork and bracketed overhangs being two of his favorite tricks.

    The Statesman
    Entrance to the Statesman
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. These were the first pictures Father Pitt took to test the 50-megapixel phone camera, so they’re a little unsophisticated. But they’re big.

  • Stone-and-Shingle Cottage in Dormont

    1708 Potomac Avenue

    Stone below and shingle above—a popular combination in the 1920s, but almost all such houses have had their shingles replaced with artificial siding. On this house in Dormont, however, the shingles remain. The roof and windows are newer replacements, but otherwise this house stands just about as it was originally built.

    Stone-and-shingle cottage
    These pictures are very large; be careful on a metered connection.
    Side of the house

    Note how the basement garage door is carefully matched to the rest of the house.

  • Dwight Avenue Houses in the Dormont Park Plan

    Dwight Avenue

    The Dormont Park plan was laid out in the late 1920s along three “mere” streets—Windermere, Earlsmere, and Grassmere Avenues, each a block long, along with the intersecting parts of Dormont and Kelton Avenues. Just before the Second World War, the Bupp-Salkeld Company added a row of thirteen houses on Dwight Avenue, parallel to the meres. They are mostly well preserved, and they make up a small museum of middle-class styles at the end of the interwar era.

    3031 Dwight Avenue
    3035
    3035

    It would look better with real shutters, but the stonework is still outstandingly picturesque.

    3047
    3051
    3051
    3055
    3061
    3061
    3065
    3067
    Window of no. 3067
    3077
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

  • The Dormont Park Plan

    3064 Windermere Avenue

    The Dormont Park Land Company was incorporated in 1927 and almost immediately began offering lots in a little square of land laid out as the Dormont Park plan, right next to Dormont Park, the one big open space in the borough of Dormont. It was an attempt to give the middle classes what the upper classes got from Mission Hills, Virginia Manor, and similar plans in Mount Lebanon: a classy neighborhood of attractive houses of high architectural merit.

    Dormont Park Plan map
    From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 1, 1927.

    “Fully restricted, high-class and exclusive”—but within an easy stroll of the streetcar line (as it still is today).

    3040 Grassmere Avenue

    The neighborhood largely delivered on its promise. A few lots remained unbuilt till after the Second World War, and the houses on them are not up to the high standard of the rest. But the majority are designs of merit, obviously designed by some of our best domestic architects. They are more modest than the ones in the big Mount Lebanon plans, but all the same styles are represented, just on a smaller scale.

    3053 Grassmere Avenue
    3036 Earlsmere Avenue
    3072 Earlsmere Avenue
    Roof slates

    Many of the houses retain their charming original details, like these deliberately irregular roof slates.

    3065 Grassmere Avenue
    3066 Grassmere Avenue
    3057 Grassmere Avenue

    Old Pa Pitt has undertaken to document every house in the plan, and he is already more than two-thirds of the way to the goal. We’ll be seeing some more of Dormont Park, but meanwhile, Father Pitt has established a category for the Dormont Park plan at Wikimedia Commons, where you can see dozens more pictures.

    Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000, Nikon COOLPIX P100.

  • Mattern Avenue, Dormont

    2943 Mattern Avenue

    Mattern Avenue is a short street that illustrates what Father Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development. In population density, Dormont is number 119 out of tens of thousands of municipalities in the United States, and it is the most densely populated municipality in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area—denser than Pittsburgh.1 Yet the streets do not feel crowded. Mattern Avenue has a mixture of large houses designed by prestigious architects, smaller single-family houses, duplexes, and an apartment building, so that a fairly large number of people are housed in a small area, but without piling them up into concrete warehouses. Instead, we get a pleasantly varied streetscape and a quiet residential street that feels roomy.

    The house above and below is by far the most original composition on the street. It seems as though the architect was told, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” So that was what the client got: a mad bungalow with some sort of growth disorder.

    2943
    Third-floor oriel
    (more…)

  • Bank in Dormont

    Bank in Dormont

    This building originally housed a bank, and was still a PNC branch until a few years ago. It was built in 1926, and it straddles the line between classical and Art Deco.

    Front of the building
    Lion ornament

    You know it’s a bank because it has a vomiting lion at the top of the building.

    Perspective view

    As with many banks, the elaborate stone front hides a building mostly clad in cheaper and more prosaic brick.

  • Some Houses on Broadway, Dormont

    2815 Broadway

    Father Pitt continues documenting the domestic architecture of the Pittsburgh area, in the hope that some of his readers will begin to appreciate the character of the neighborhoods they live in.

    Broadway in Dormont is the boulevard where the streetcars run in the median. That makes it a prominent street, and on one side some of the better-off citizens of the middle-class borough built houses on a lavishly upper-middle-class scale. The Tudor house above has had its porch enclosed, which disguises what would have been an interesting design with an overhanging second-floor sunroom. (Update: Note the comment from a kind correspondent who has pleasant memories of this house when the porch was still there.)

    2817

    This one has had vinyl siding applied with fairly good taste, but it would originally have been shingled above the ground floor.

    2821
    2821
    2825

    Here we have arts-and-crafts style applied to the standard Pittsburgh Foursquare arrangement. The wood trim has been replaced with aluminum; there would probably have been prominent carved brackets to add to the arts-and-crafts appeal.

    2827
    2831
    2831
    2835

    The archetypal Pittsburgh Foursquare.

    2841
    2845
    2849
    Houses along Broadway

    When these houses were built, the big attraction of this street was its direct trolley link to downtown Pittsburgh.

    Trolley passing

    That is still true today.

  • Refurbishing a Building in Dormont

    After many years of a drab modern front on the first floor, this building on West Liberty Avenue has been given a makeover that brings the ground floor back to something more like the original look.