The congregation dissolved in 2020, so here is an excellent opportunity for an investment in a beautiful building in a trendifying neighborhood. It is in very good shape, and it has enough architectural distinctiveness to make its new owner proud. It also commands a prominent corner on Brownsville Road.
Old maps seem to show that this house was built in the 1880s. The storefront is probably a later addition put on when Brownsville Road became the main shopping street of Mount Oliver. It has been very neatly refurbished for its current tenant, a gourmet cheese shop called “The Cheese Queen.” But before its windows were replaced a few years ago, the upper floors had the kind of three-over-one windows that were popular in the 1920s, just when the commercial strip on Brownsville Road was rapidly developing. Those two observations probably date the time this typical 1800s Pittsburgh frame house was converted to a store with apartment above.
Almost by accident the Mount Oliver Municipal Building is a very attractive little building. It probably dates from the middle 1920s, and it was designed with minimal decoration but a tasteful attention to detail—note the brick pilasters that frame the façade and the little brickwork ornaments above the inscription, two small touches that preserve the building from banality. The front has been modernized, but the newer doors and windows fit into the building well and accent the form of it; too often we see renovations that ignore the rest of the building. We should also not neglect to point out that the two inscriptions are just about perfect, simple but in exactly the right spots, and with the letters spaced just right.
The borough of Mount Oliver puts up very tasteful greenery along Brownsville Road for the Christmas season, and a fine Christmas tree next to the municipal building.
This storefront on Brownsville Road has layers of history. The original 1920 building must have been an interesting design; enough remains to show us that somebody tried hard to make it distinctive and up to date.
The ground floor looks like a postwar remodeling, and a well-preserved inscription in the floor of the entrance tells us that it was a shop called Harvard’s.
As Mount Oliver trendifies, this storefront may become more desirable, and if you are the owner of a small business moving in, old Pa Pitt has a suggestion: whatever your business is, call it “Harvard’s.” You then have a ready-made logo, as well as a distinctive sidewalk inscription to welcome your customers. It would be an especially good name for the intellectual sort of used bookstore.
Father Pitt had to stand in the street and risk the wrath of the No. 51 bus to get this picture, but that is the kind of effort he is willing to make for you, his faithful readers.
As you pass by on the opposite side of Brownsville Road, pause to admire the finial at the peak of the gable.
The front of this building, which was originally constructed a little before 1910, has been perfectly pickled in the middle twentieth century. It is now an antique store advertising “useful junk,” and if you enlarge the picture, you will see how much of that junk is a perfect match for the era of the storefront itself.
Here is a building that probably dates from the 1890s, and it appears to be occupied by the business that built it. Miller Hardware has expanded into the building next door as well, but it is still an old-fashioned hardware store.
There are many ways to modernize an old storefront and keep in sympathy with the architecture of the building. Let us label this one incorrect. It was doubtless touted as a quality job by the contractor. But this is why there are architects as well as builders: because the people who are good at putting things together are not always the people who are good at deciding how things ought to be put together.
The upper two floors of the building are still in remarkably good classical taste. The pediment has been filled in with some kind of siding—who thought ribbed siding would look better than a plain flat surface?—but the ornamental details of the windows and pilasters are still in good shape. It would not take a huge investment to make a tastefully modern front for the ground floor that would not fight the upper storeys with every weapon available to architecture.
Italian Renaissance architecture filtered through an Art Deco lens makes an extraordinarily rich little building on Brownsville Road. The storefronts have been modernized; they would almost certainly not have had doors that open right into pedestrians’ faces when this building was put up in 1928. But the overall impression the building makes is still dignified, with a touch of Venetian fantasy that reminds us of a Pandro S. Berman production.
This tiny building has a simple but rich front; we suspect that the projecting roof was originally covered with green tile, which would have set off the Arts-and-Crafts stained glass even more.
Mount Oliver is having a bit of a revival these days. Luckily it never declined far enough to start losing buildings in its main commercial strip here on Brownsville Road, so the street is still lined with uninterrupted shops from Arlington Avenue to Bausman Street. For a while a considerable number of them were empty, but they are filling up again. The building at left with the green awning is the old Murphy’s variety store; it is now being made into artists’ studios by the couple who own the trendy Echt coffeehouse around the corner.
It is hard to explain Mount Oliver to people outside the hilltop neighborhoods of southern Pittsburgh. It is completely surrounded by the city of Pittsburgh, but it is an independent borough, the sole holdout when the back slopes of Mount Washington were annexed by the city. Its residents pay taxes to the borough government, but also to the city school system, because Mount Oliver buys its schooling from Pittsburgh. To make things a little more confusing and surreal, one of the adjacent neighborhoods of Pittsburgh is called “Mount Oliver,” but it is part of the city, not part of the borough. Street signs at what pass for major intersections in that second Mount Oliver identify it as “Mount Oliver Neigh,” so your horse can read them.
