A typical streetscape of a typical prosperous middle-class streetcar suburb in the Pittsburgh area.
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Philadelphia Avenue, Dormont
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Potomac Station
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Dormont Village
This composite picture is very big if you enlarge it. Old Pa Pitt’s unending mission is to help the people of Pittsburgh and surroundings see the things they pass right by without seeing. So here is a strip mall. You drive right past it without thinking that there could possibly be anything interesting about it, but this is in fact one of the pioneer strip malls in the Pittsburgh area. It was built in 1940 to a design by Thomas Benner Garman, a Mount Lebanon architect most of whose work was in traditional houses for the upper middle classes. When he designed commercial buildings, though, he adopted a decidedly modern style.
The key to his architectural ambidexterity was his sense of context. “Nature,” he said in 1956, “has a law that fits architecture—namely: Avoid the grotesque and unseemly.”1 What fits a street of suburban homes is not what fits a commercial thoroughfare.
The new Dormont Shops were promoted as a “drive-in one-stop shopping center,” a place where the suburban motorist would have the luxury of parking right out in front of the stores to do all the week’s shopping in one place. From the Pittsburgh Press, April 7, 1940:
The drive-in one-stop shopping center being erected on W. Liberty Ave., Dormont, is nearing completion.
The $250,000 building will be 250 feet long and 75 feet deep. It is set back about 80 feet from the street to provide parking space.
Frank H. Opferman, South Hills contractor, is the owner and builder. J. D. Marshall, real estate broker, is the exclusive rental agent. Thomas B. Garman was the architect.
Site of the building is the historic Fetterman homestead, one of Dormont’s landmarks. The razed house was more than 100 years old.
Old Pa Pitt will do the developers and Mr. Garman the justice to note that the “historic Fetterman homestead” had been butchered long before it was razed for this project. It had spent the last few decades as an apartment building, with various ramshackle additions.
Although the shopping center has been remodeled more than once, we can still get some idea of its original features. The arrangement was typical of the first generation of what we now call “strip malls”: it had two floors, with the main shops on the ground floor and miscellaneous businesses upstairs—along with a bowling alley in the basement.2 (Yes, you could hear the bowling going on in the shops.) The crest right in the middle of the building, which marks the entrance to the second floor, retains some of its Art Deco massing.
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Dormont Recreation Center
Built in the 1920s in a strikingly modernistic style, the Dormont Recreation Center still serves the citizens of the borough who come every summer for one of the area’s most popular swimming pools, which first opened in 1920.
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A Stroll on Glenmore Avenue in Dormont
A few pictures from a very brief walk after a day of rain. Glenmore Avenue may not be quite as tony as Espy Avenue a block away, but it has its share of elegant homes. As in many other streets in Dormont, the elegant homes are mixed in with pleasant little apartment houses and duplexes—a core principle of what old Pa Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development.
We start with a house that, although it is addressed to Glenmore, actually faces the cross street, Lasalle Avenue.
This Tudor seems to present a modest front to LaSalle Avenue, but turning the corner to Glenmore Avenue reveals a long side of dimensions that would almost qualify it for mansion status.
Next to the Tudor mansion, a symmetrical double house arranged as two Dutch Colonial houses back to back.
A typical Pittsburgh duplex—except that the typical Pittsburgh slope of the lot gives it the opportunity for a third apartment in the basement, with a ground-level entrance on the side street, Key Avenue.
An apartment building that looks like many other small apartment buildings in Dormont. They probably all share the same architect: Charles Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed dozens of buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon.
Even though he has walked on Glenmore Avenue many times before, old Pa Pitt never made this association before now. This is a smaller cottage, but it was clearly designed by the same hand that drew this overgrown bungalow on Mattern Avenue:
This is what you get if you tell your architect, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” The house on Glenmore may originally have had stucco and half-timbering like this: there’s no telling what’s under that aluminum siding.
Canon PowerShot A540; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This striking house in a subdued version of Prairie Style has been rescued from decay, with tiny plastic paste-on shutters as a signifier of a high-class renovation. Here they are installed behind downspouts, which makes them even more conceptually absurd.
More pictures of Glenmore Avenue.
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Weber Apartments, Dormont
Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film. The striking patterned brickwork of an apartment building in Dormont captured in glorious monochrome.
We also have color pictures of this building and its neighbors.
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Potomac Station, Dormont
Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film. Potomac gives Red Line riders easy access to the Dormont business district, which is full of odd little shops and restaurants that make it well worth a visit. Some of the houses in streets nearby are architecturally significant, and a walk through the back streets of Dormont is always pleasant.
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Apartment Buildings on Broadway Avenue, Dormont
The northwest side of Broadway Avenue in Dormont is lined with small to medium-sized apartment buildings and duplexes. There’s a variety of styles, but we suspect more than one of them came from the pencil of Charles Geisler, who designed many apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, and who lived not far away in Beechview.
These two are exceptionally convenient to transit: their front doors open right across from the Stevenson stop on the Red Line.
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Storefront on Potomac Avenue, Dormont
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. A beautiful storefront with veiny marble and a large panel of stained glass spanning the whole width. Note the properly inset entrance, so that the door does not fly open into passing pedestrians’ faces—a requirement we have forgotten.
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Apartment Buildings on Voelkel Avenue, Dormont
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.
This one has a different configuration of apartment windows, possibly more like the original. It has lost its art glass in the stairwell, however.
The entrance to the D’Alo, on the corner of Voelkel and Potomac Avenues.
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.
