You can call it “Deutschtown” after old Pa Pitt is dead.
This building was put up in 1902 or thereabouts, by which time Eberhardt & Ober was a division of Pittsburg Brewing. The contractor was Charles Reiff; old Pa Pitt has not been able to find an architect. Joseph Stillburg, who designed the main buildings across the street, was still working (and was fond of big arches); but his career is better researched than most architects’ careers in Pittsburgh, and we find nothing specifically connecting him with this building.
These brick rowhouses—or double houses with narrow passages between—are a little more substantial than the frame houses on the other side of the street, but they fit with them in scale. The decorated cornices and dormers elevate these houses from common lower-class rowhouses to common middle-class rowhouses, and they have been attractively restored.
A long row of mansard-roofed frame houses whose various alterations have not completely diminished the impressive effect of the row.
Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.
For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.
“Eberhardt & Ober” is quite a mouthful when you want to order beer, so most people just called it E&O, and the company bowed to the public will in its advertising. The initials suggested the slogan “Early & Often,” which became so famous in Pittsburgh that some older Pittsburghers still have it on their lips as a catchphrase for anything that’s worth doing over and over.
This old painted sign facing Moravian Way in Dutchtown, where it can be seen from the East Ohio Street business district, was a faded ghost until some years ago, when it was lovingly repainted to exactly its original appearance.
Carson Street on the South Side has our best collection of Victorian commercial buildings. For the second place, several neighborhood spine streets are in the running. Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield is one; Butler Street in Lawrenceville is another. But for variety and quality of Victorian architecture, old Pa Pitt might award the second place to East Ohio Street in Dutchtown.
This little house with storefront is probably one of the earliest buildings on the street. Italianate details like the brackets place it in the middle nineteenth century, but otherwise it is not much different from the houses that grew up in Pittsburgh and Allegheny from the moment we had access to bricks.
The contrast with the high-Victorian building next door is striking. This building must have looked frightfully modern in 1888. The next generation of architects would find it old-fashioned, because they had gone back to a more pedantically correct classicism.
This row of houses on Middle Street has a complicated history, and old Pa Pitt is not sure of all the details. A row of four brick houses stood here at least as early as the 1880s. At some point in the 1930s or thereabouts, they appear to have been refaced with yellow and white face brick, and given metal-framed casement windows typical of modernist buildings of the era. It is possible that they were rebuilt, but Father Pitt leans toward saying they were the same houses with new faces, because he recalls noticing what appeared to be older chimneys in plain red brick.
In 2019, the houses were thoroughly renovated again, with the main parts of the houses restored to the way they would have looked in the 1800s, but a new postpostmodern third floor that gives each house a delightful balcony and a bright upper room.
This ornate building was put up in the 1880s for an obviously prosperous grocer named F. Beckert, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt can tell you about it. Whoever drew the Ohio Street façade had a great deal of fun tracing angular intersecting lines. In fact those lines may be more clever than we realize at first glance: they disguise the asymmetry of the front. The left bay is wider than the other two, but because of the complexity of the patterns in the ornamentation, we read the building as symmetrical.
Except for the new windows on the second floor, which look a bit staring but do at least seem to fit the holes they were made for, this building is unusually well preserved—a Victorian feast of ornaments of all types, applied lavishly but not without an eye for the overall effect.
The fact that the left half is a sort of narrower duplicate of the right half suggests that it was built as an addition when Mr. Hollander acquired the lot next door.
This splendid building dates from 1883; it is one of the most substantial remaining works of Joseph Stillburg, who was a big deal in Pittsburgh in the 1800s. Eberhardt & Ober was later absorbed into Pittsburgh Brewing, but the E&O brand was kept for many years, along with the memorable slogan “Early & Often.”
The building is well kept as the home of the Penn Brewery, which arguably founded the craft-beer movement and probably makes better beer than Eberhardt & Ober ever made.
This office building, also designed by Stillburg, was built in 1897.
The tall building with few windows was the stock house. Old Pa Pitt is not sure what the handsome little building attached to it was; perhaps a neighborhood historian can enlighten us.
