Father Pitt

Would you like to see a random article?
Of course you would.

Skyscraper Apartments for the Postwar Era

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

This was one of the major developments in postwar Pittsburgh—a $5,500,000 skyscraper apartment house financed by the FHA. Tennyson & Van Wart were the architects—a partnership of Arthur Tennyson, of Mount Lebanon, and John Van Wart, a successful New York architect who had been lured here in the 1930s by a job with Westinghouse. For many decades it has been a hotel under various owners, currently as the Doubletree.

From the Pittsburgh Press, March 3, 1950.

“The Federal Housing Administration has insured a mortgage loan to build a 19-story, H-shaped structure on Webster Ave. on the site of St. Mary’s High School and Home for Girls at Webster Ave. and Tunnel St,” the Press reported.

“It will cost approximately $5½ million and provide housing for 465 families. Construction is expected to begin in June and be completed by June, 1951.”

Mr. Van Wart died unexpectedly in June of 1950, while this building was under construction. Tennyson continued the practice alone, and would end up designing many more modernist apartment blocks in the Pittsburgh area. We’ll see more of his work.

Comments

One response

April 11, 2025
The Thomas Row, South Side

It is a little hard to date these houses on South 10th Street from old plat maps, and any South Side historians who have good information are earnestly invited to enlighten us. The two on the right end are separate from the rest and slightly larger. A row of houses appears on this land in 1872, belonging to someone named Thomas. In 1882, however, all but the two houses on the right are gone; the rest of the land is vacant. By 1890 the row is full again, still belonging to the Thomas family, except for the last house on the left, which belongs to someone named Todt.

Father Pitt’s best guess, then, is that the two houses on the right date from the Civil War era. The rest of the houses might have burned in about 1880, and were rebuilt in what was still the usual vernacular style for small rowhouses. But this is only a wild guess, and more information would be welcome. It is, after all, possible that the 1882 map was wrong, and the houses never went away.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

Comments

April 11, 2025
Immaculate Conception Church, Bloomfield

Update: This church was demolished shortly after this article appeared. It seems the misunderstanding we mentioned below was not so easy to clear up.

This modernist church was dedicated by Cardinal Wright in 1960. The architects were Belli & Belli of Chicago. The stained glass was by Pittsburgh’s Hunt Studios; the scribbly outlines visible from the outside are typical of their postwar work. The church was abandoned by the diocese, but the last old Pa Pitt heard it was being worked on for another use. (In fact there was a stop-work order pasted on the window when Father Pitt walked by in February, but he assumes that is just a minor misunderstanding that will be cleared up.)

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Canon PoaerShot SX150 IS.

Map.

Comments

2 responses

April 11, 2025
Sochatoff Building (Crawford Grill), Hill District

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.

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.

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.

Comments

April 10, 2025
Gerber Carriage Company Building

Rutan & Russell were the architects of this Renaissance palace, which opened in 1905. It’s also known as the Oppenheimer Building, and today as Aria Cultural District Lofts.

You can still see the sign for the Gerber Carriage Co. at the top of the building.

Canon PowerShot SX150IS.

Map.

Comments

April 10, 2025
Oliver Bathhouse, South Side

The Oliver Bathhouse, built as the South Side Baths but soon renamed for its donor (who had died in the long delay between the donation and the construction), has been getting a thorough restoration and renovation. The outside of the building looks almost brand new.

This picture from Preservation Pittsburgh’s collection is dated January 31, 1913, at Wikimedia Commons, but that is an error. In the Construction Record for May 30, 1914, we read, “Architects MacClure & Spahr, Keystone building, will lake bids until June 1 on the erection of a brick, stone and terra cotta fireproof bath house on Tenth and Bingham streets, for the Henry W. Oliver Estate. Cost $100,000.” The building might have been finished by January of 1915 if the construction got started right away. Wikipedia concurs that the building was finished in 1915. Since this picture was taken from a printed source, we suspect that a poorly-scanned “1918” might have been misread as “1913.”

“South Side Baths, presented to the City of Pittsburgh by Henry W. Oliver.”

Oliver’s steel mills nearby employed many of the workmen who would benefit from these baths. He might not pay them enough to afford more than squalid tenements with inadequate bathing facilities, but he was willing to spend enough to make them smell better on Saturday nights.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

The Oliver Bathhouse survives as a bathhouse, uniquely among the public baths in Pittsburgh, because the more upscale denizens of today’s South Side appreciate its large indoor swimming pool, the only city pool open in the winter.

More pictures of the Oliver Bathhouse.

Map.

Comments

April 10, 2025
Snively House, North Point Breeze

This fashionably Romanesque house was probably built in the 1890s for a W. Snively. It has been converted to apartments, but the original outlines of the house are still evident. If, by the way, you are embarrassed by the soot stains on the stone of your house, old Pa Pitt suggests overcoming your embarrassment and embracing the history that soot represents. The alternative of painting your stone grey is not a success.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Comments

April 10, 2025
The Baptism of Fire

Pittsburgh After the Fire from Boyd’s Hill, by William C. Wall, 1845. In the Carnegie Museum of Art.

“Every year, on the 10th day of April, the ﬁre-bells ring out the number 1-8-4-5, in memory of the baptism of ﬁre that comes, sooner or later, to nearly every city. Like all great disasters of this kind, the origin was triﬂing. While the loyal but noisy ﬁre-cracker decorates the historical shield of the ﬁre department of Portland, Maine, and the combination of a kicking cow and a coal-oil lamp that of Chicago, the homely but useful wash-boiler stands as a reminder of the greatest disaster that has ever fallen on Pittsburgh. Early in the morning of the 10th of April, I845, an extra hot ﬁre under a wash-boiler, in a poor tenement at the corner of Ferry street and Second street, now second avenue, started a ﬁre which, for lack of water, was soon beyond the control of the ﬁre department. A high wind carried the burning ﬁre-brands over the different portions of the city, and in a few hours one-third of the geographical extent of the city and two-thirds of its value, was only a mass of charred cinders. The estimated loss was from six to eight million dollars, while twelve thousand people, most of whom had been in good circumstances, were rendered homeless. Fortunately but two persons lost their lives, one being Mr. Samuel Kingston, and the other Mrs. Malone. This was a severe blow to the business interests of the city, but with remarkable pluck the work of rebuilding was begun at once. The most liberal settlements were made by those having goods here on commission, generous aid was extended to the sufferers, and the city rallied rapidly from what otherwise would have been its death knell.”

—The Illustrated Guide and Handbook of Pittsburgh and Allegheny (1887), p. 20.

Comments

April 10, 2025
Pythian Temple, Hill District

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.

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.

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.

Comments

April 9, 2025
A Few Houses on Perrysville Avenue, Perry Hilltop

Perrysville Avenue started as a plank road, with tollgates, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it began to fill up as the spine of a pleasant suburban neighborhood of Allegheny. Today Perry Hilltop is a strange mixture of appalling decay and beautiful restoration: it has never quite got off the ground as a trendy neighborhood, but some of the houses have been beautifully preserved. The splendid Dutch Colonial mansion above, for example, is in very good shape. Note the original windows. It was probably built around the turn of the twentieth century.

A Victorian frame house that preserves some of its original details, including the trim around the windows. It appears on an 1882 plat map, so it probably dates from the 1870s.

This center-hall manse has a third-floor dormer that, fortunately, no one has ever had the money to modernize.

This house was probably built at some time around the First World War.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Comments

April 9, 2025