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
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.
Some of the old Heinz factory buildings have been turned into loft apartments, and some are still awaiting their next use. The H. J. Heinz Company was a kind of workers’ paradise when old H. J. himself ran it—there was never a strike, never a wage reduction; medical care was free; there was a library and a gymnasium, free concerts for everyone in the auditorium, and even free manicures for the women. Heinz was also notorious for pushing for federal food regulations when the rest of the food industry was fighting them tooth and nail. It was probably just the way old H. J. was constituted, but it was also priceless publicity: would you rather buy food from the company that fights federal oversight or the company that flings wide the doors and welcomes the inspectors?
Pittsburghers who remember the days before we had the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist will remember this as the Volkwein’s building, which housed one of the largest music stores in North America. (Volkwein’s moved to the western suburbs, where the tradition of carrying more music than anyone else continues.) But it was built as a warehouse for the Frick & Lindsay Company, a purveyor of “industrial supplies.” If warehouses were commonly as splendid as this, there would be regularly scheduled tours of the warehouse district.
No one knows who designed the original building, but in a Post-Gazette article from 1993 (when the building was under restoration), Walter Kidney suggests the William G. Wilkins Co. (Update: We have confirmed that the William G. Wilkins company were the architects.1 Specifically, the building seems to have been designed by Joseph F. Kuntz, who worked for Wilkins.) The details were originally in terra cotta, but the cornice had been entirely removed and other details were damaged. During the restoration, the cornice and some of the other decorations were reconstructed in glass-reinforced concrete from photographs, records, and imagination.
The Frick of Frick & Lindsay was William Frick, a distant relative of the famous robber baron Henry Clay Frick.
Big Heart Pet Brands is the former pet-food division of Del Monte. You know the names of many of their products from endless television commercials. This attractive, though rather pedestrian, building on the North Shore is the Eastern offices of the company, which is based in San Francisco; it’s a good example of the transformation of the North Shore in the last two decades.
From Motion Picture World, 1912.
Father Pitt does not know the exact location of either of these establishments. The fact that the Casino was remarkable for having been in the same place for eight years shows how temporary these early theaters often were. Pittsburgh, of course, invented the movie theater, and by 1912 no neighborhood was complete without one. The larger ones, like the Casino below, also booked vaudeville acts.
From Motion Picture World, 1912.
