Seen across Lake Elizabeth. This monument was “Erected to the memory of the 4,000 brave men of Allegheny County who fell in the great struggle to preserve the integrity of our Union.” Even today, four thousand men would be a huge number from this one county, and Allegheny County did not have more than a million people in it back in the 1860s.
Near the memorial was a bridge over the railroad, now gone, with the approaches blocked by chain-link fence. Some enterprising romantic discovered that the fence makes a fine billboard for a message spelled out in padlocks.
The Allegheny City Stables were built in 1896. If you enlarge the photo (click on it), you can just make out the old sign over the main door:
D.P.W. 8th DIV. BUREAU OF HIGHWAYS & SEWERS
It’s right across North Avenue from Allegheny West, then the richest neighborhood in Allegheny. Perhaps this was one of the encroachments that induced Allegheny West society to move in a body to Sewickley Heights, where their descendants still live today.
Now, 123 years later, Allegheny West is once again the finest neighborhood on the North Side, and its desirability is spilling across North Avenue. The stable is being renovated and turned into loft apartments, like every other old industrial building.
(And if you notice a familiar picture at the Wikipedia article, it’s because Father Pitt added it himself to show the current state of the building.)
This fine old firehouse on Arch Street, a city-designated historic structure, is exactly what you think of when you think of a firehouse. It’s been empty for some time, but its Central Northside neighborhood is growing more and more fashionable among restoration fanatics, and scaffolding inside suggests that the old firehouse will not be empty much longer.
MapThe firehouse is on the southeast corner of Arch Street and Jacksonia Street. Behind it is the aptly named Fireman Way.
A woman feeds geese from the bridge over Lake Elizabeth in West Park. The old city of Allegheny was laid out with green space all the way around the town center—green space that mostly survives (though the southern section of it was long ago sacrificed to the railroad) as some of our most inviting urban parkland.
One of the most exuberantly gaudy Art Deco façades in Pittsburgh is in a neighborhood almost no one ever visits. Fortunately things are looking up in California-Kirkbride—or Calbride as it’s called by denizens—which was once a notoriously bad neighborhood. Restoration mania has taken root in the Old Allegheny Rows Historic District, spilling over from the Mexican War Streets and Allegheny West nearby. Meanwhile, this building is preserved by lucky economics: it houses a letter-carriers’ union and some other tenants who will keep it standing without spending the money to change its appearance significantly. According to comments on this page at Cinema Treasures, the theater was built in 1928, replacing an earlier Brighton Theater on Brighton Road (this one is on the parallel Brighton Place).
The architect’s scheme called for three masks to decorate the central section, so we have one Comedy and two Tragedies. And don’t miss the thoroughly Art Deco elephants on the corners:
Addendum: The architects were Rubin & Veshancy;1 the theater opened toward the end of 1928.2
“Plan New Theater for Center Avenue,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, November 20, 1927. ↩︎
“North Side’s Newest Playhouse to Open Soon,” Pittsburgh Press, November 4, 1928. ↩︎
Eberhardt & Ober was one of Pittsburgh’s favorite beers for many years—E & O, for “Early and Often,” as the advertisements put it. (What a cheery slogan—and yet one that would probably not be tolerated today.) The building is a fine example of German-American brewery architecture.
Mr. Eberhardt and Mr. Ober were not only business partners, but also friends for life—and even beyond life.
Though Eberhardt & Ober conscientiously brewed beer to the strict German standards of purity, the beer that comes out of this building now is probably better than anything E & O ever produced. This is now the home of the Penn Brewery, which—in addition to making some very good beer—operates a restaurant serving the kind of German food that makes beer sing.
The buildings you see here are on Vinial Street, which is the arbitrary dividing line on city planning maps between East Allegheny and Troy Hill. No sane Pittsburgher would call this Troy Hill, though, or say that the brewery is in a different neighborhood from the bottling plant a few yards across the street. By any reasonable standard, the brewery is in Dutchtown—which, fortunately, is not an official neighborhood name, and so can have any arbitrary boundaries common usage would like to assign to it.
Addendum: The architect of the buildings was Joseph Stillburg, one of our most successful mid-Victorian architects. Many of his buildings are gone, but his influence on Pittsburgh architecture was huge. Teenage Frederick Osterling worked in Stillburg’s office, where he would have seen firsthand how to manage the kind of large architectural operation that his own practice later became.
The Parkway North swerved to avoid this splendid church, but destroyed the whole neighborhood that made up its parish. Now a worship site of Holy Wisdom Parish, St. Boniface is also home to the officially sanctioned Latin Mass community in Pittsburgh (as opposed to other Latin Mass churches that call themselves Catholic but are repudiated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy).
The Alcoa headquarters is a modernist symphony in aluminum. Father Pitt confesses to liking this building a great deal better than the old Alcoa building downtown, which still looks like a pile of old television sets to him.
Frederick Osterling built this charming little building in 1917 to be his office and studio. From it he had a fine view of the Pittsburgh skyline that he was helping shape—a view now blocked by the new Alcoa building.
