Father Pitt

Category: Hill District

  • Sochatoff Building (Crawford Grill), Hill District

    Top of the Sochatoff Building

    William Arthur Thomas, who was very active in the Hill District, was the architect of this building, which is famous in jazz lore as the location of the second Crawford Grill.

    Crawford Grill

    The Crawford Grill lingered on into our current century, the last and most famous of the Wylie Avenue jazz clubs. (Father Pitt took the picture above in 2000.) It was in some ways a victim of its own success: it moved to the Freighthouse Shops at Station Square just when shopping arcades in general were beginning to decline, and closed there after a few years.

    Sochatoff Building
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    Today the building has been stabilized (though the fine Queen Anne house next to it could not be saved), and there is some hope that it can be an asset to the community again. We may yet hear the wail of a saxophone coming through that front door.

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  • Pythian Temple, Hill District

    Pythian Temple

    This is the most important remaining work of Louis Bellinger, who for his entire career was the only Black architect in Western Pennsylvania. It was built as the Pythian Temple, an exceptionally grand lodge house. It opened in 1928; but after less than ten years it was sold and became a movie theater, the New Granada, with the ground floor redesigned in streamlined Art Deco by Marks & Kann. Both as a lodge and as a theater it was one of the great jazz venues of all time, and the roster of stars who performed here is long and dazzling—Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and our own Lena Horne, just to name four.

    After half a century of vacancy and multiple schemes for restoration, the New Granada is finally getting the love it deserves. It will have performance spaces and offices, and the whole block has been redeveloped with colorful new apartments and restored older buildings.

    Knight’s helmet in terra cotta

    Except for the ground floor, the building still stands very much as Bellinger designed it. Shields and helmets in terra cotta remind us of the building’s Knights of Pythias origins.

    Shield and helmet
    New Granada Theater
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    In seventeen and a half years of writing about Pittsburgh, few things have made old Pa Pitt happier than seeing the progress on this building. It will stand for years as a tribute to a neglected architect, to the history of the Hill, and to the great legacy of jazz in Pittsburgh.

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  • FNB Financial Center

    FNB Financial Center

    Our newest skyscraper, with a bonus bus coming toward you and a reflection of the Gulf Building. Opened just last year in 2024, this is the sixteenth-tallest skyscraper in Pittsburgh and the second-tallest outside downtown, after the Cathedral of Learning. It was designed by Gensler, the world’s largest architecture factory, which was also responsible for the Tower at PNC Plaza. Old Pa Pitt cannot help feeling that the Tower at PNC Plaza got the A unit at Gensler, whereas this one got the C unit. But it is an attempt, after sixty years, to fulfill the promises of redevelopment that were made when the Lower Hill was cleared.

    FNB Financial Center
    FNB Financial Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • Irene Kaufmann Settlement Auditorium, Hill District

    Irene Kaufmann Settlement

    Edward Stotz was the architect of this auditorium, built in 1928. It was the centerpiece of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, which was founded by the Kaufmanns of Kaufmann’s department store to memorialize a daughter who died young; its purpose was to serve the poor immigrants of the Hill.

    Irene Kaufmann Settlement
    Inscription: “Irene Kaufmann Settlement”
    Entrance
    Irene Kaufmann Settlement
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  • Wesley Center AME Zion Church, Hill District

    Wesley Center AME Zion Church

    A striking modernist Gothic church whose clean lines are lovingly preserved by the congregation. Below, we add some bonus utility cables to prove that this is Pittsburgh.

    Wesley Center with utility cables

  • St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Hill District

    Cupola of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Hill District

    Elise Mercur was an extraordinary woman. The first female professional architect in Pittsburgh, and one of the first anywhere, she had a prosperous career for about a decade between 1894 and 1905. Then she retired, and most of her buildings have been crushed by the steamroller of time—or by university presidents who need them out of the way to make room for some donor’s vanity project.

    St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

    This church remains, however. It was built for the St. Paul’s Episcopal congregation; later it passed to the Church of the Holy Cross, a Black Episcopal congregation that eventually moved to Homewood. Right now it belongs to the Christian Tabernacle Kodesh Church of Immanuel.

    Centre Avenue end of the church
    From the side

    Those little triangular dormers are imitated from Richardson, who used them in his famous Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Allegheny West.

    The Wikipedia article on Elise Mercur is unusually thorough, so old Pa Pitt will not repeat its information here. He will add, however, that he has been scanning old trade journals to see whether any other buildings by Mercur have survived, and he will publish any findings in this spot.

    Perspective view

    As the only known remaining work of our first female architect, this church has a historical significance that makes it a preservation priority. Father Pitt assigns it to the Near Threatened category in his classification of our vulnerable landmarks.

    Cupola

    The most striking feature of St. Paul’s is the octagonal cupola.

    Cupola

  • Warren United Methodist Church, Hill District

    Warren United Methodist Church

    The Warren United Methodist Church might qualify for Rundbogenstil were it not for the very slight pointing of the arches, which takes away the Rund part of Rundbogenstil. With its battlemented roofline, it gives the impression of a chapel built into a castle. The attached parsonage is more interesting and more striking than the church when we see it from the street, and our only legitimate complaint about it would be that it draws too much attention toward itself and away from the church.

    Parsonage and church
    Parsonage

    Addendum: The architects of the church, and probably the parsonage as well, were Milligan & Miller of Wilkinsburg; it was built in about 1908. Source: Ohio Architect and Builder, July, 1907. “PITTSBURG.—Architects Milligan & Miller, of Wilkinsburg, are drawing plans for a brick and stone church to be erected on Center avenue, for the Warren Methodist Episcopal congregation. Cost $3,000.” A zero has probably been left out of the cost; you could not get a brick and stone church for $3,000, but this could easily be a $30,000 church.

  • Store and Apartments by J. E. Cole, Hill District

    2909 Centre Avenue

    So far this is the only building old Pa Pitt has identified as designed by J. E. Cole, about whom he knows nothing other than that Cole designed this building. The storefront has been modernized, but otherwise the building is in near-original condition. The corner is an obtuse angle, and Father Pitt wonders whether the unusual seam at that corner was the result of the architect’s original plan, or of the low-bidding contractor’s refusal to trim the bricks properly without an extra payment. It was imitated many years later by whoever added the modern storefront.

    Dwelling House Savings

  • Ewart House, Hill District

    Ewart House

    Short of a miracle, nothing can save this rambling manse from the middle 1800s, so we can only remember that it was here with these pictures. It was built in various stages by the Ewart family, who once owned all the land on both sides of Centre Avenue in this part of the Hill. The earliest part was probably built in the 1850s or 1860s; the frame addition may be as late as the twentieth century. The whole building will be demolished when the city gets around to it: it is only blocks from million-dollar houses in Schenley Farms, but those blocks make the difference.

    Gable end
    Perspective view
    Detail
    Perspective view of the front
    Woodwork
    Centre Avenue face
    Ewart House

  • FNB Financial Center

    FNB Financial Center tower nearing completion

    It’s getting close to done—our fifteenth-tallest skyscraper, if old Pa Pitt’s calculations are right, and the first really big one built outside downtown since the Cathedral of Learning. When the Lower Hill was demolished to get all those poor people out of sight of the executives downtown, the promise was that it would be replaced with a gargantuan cultural and commercial center that would make Pittsburgh proud. Instead it became mostly arid wasteland. This complex, of which the tower is the most visible manifestation, is promoting itself as finally delivering on those promises made all those decades ago, with “next-level social impact” and everything. Since we waited this long, we came out of the era of arid and uninspired International Style architecture, went straight through the era of Postmodernism, and landed smack in the middle of the Arid and Uninspired International Style Revival. The design came from Gensler, the world’s largest architecture factory.