Father Pitt

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Store and Apartments by Louis Stevens, Carrick
This was an early commission for Louis Stevens,¹ who would be best known in his career for houses and mansions for the rich and the upper middle class. It was built in 1911 on Churchview Avenue (then called Church Avenue, but renamed Churchview when Carrick was taken into the city of Pittsburgh), just off Brownsville Road. Four years earlier, Stevens had been studying architecture in Carnegie Tech’s night school. The front of the building has been muddled a bit, but the renovations were done in a halfhearted manner that allows us to appreciate the original composition.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
1. Our source for the attribution is this map of Stevens’ works created by a Google Maps user, to whom many thanks. ↩︎
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April 1, 2025
Byers-Lyons House, Allegheny West

Father Pitt will admit to having removed an ugly utility pole from this picture. Perhaps some day he will do an article about the utility pole and remove the house.

Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, Pittsburgh’s most prestigious firm, were the architects of this Flemish Renaissance mansion, which is now Byers Hall of the Community College of Allegheny County. Of the surviving millionaires’ mansions in Allegheny West, this is old Pa Pitt’s favorite. It is impressively huge, but the details are inviting rather than forbidding. Even the huge iron gate in front seems to be there more to invite you in than to keep you out.

The arcade on two sides of a garden court forms a pleasant cloister in front of the house, rather than behind it, suggesting that the residents do not turn their backs on their neighbors.

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Are these the most artistic chimneys in Pittsburgh? They are certainly in the running, at any rate.

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March 31, 2025
B. F. Jones Building

Built in 1881, this is the only remaining downtown work of Joseph Stillburg—as far as old Pa Pitt knows, but he still hopes for surprises. Stillburg was a very big deal in Pittsburgh in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, but most of his buildings have disappeared. They were prominent buildings in their time—the Pittsburgh Exposition buildings, for example, and the Bissell Block—but they were replaced by other even grander projects as the land they were built on became even more valuable (or, in the case of the Exposition buildings, they were taken down for Point Park).

This building is a symphonic fugue of perfectly balanced themes and rhythms woven into a composition that must have been strikingly modern in 1881. It has been restored and renovated with good taste, and it is ready for another century and a half of use.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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March 31, 2025
Tenth United Presbyterian Church, Dutchtown

This church has a complicated history. It was built as the Tenth United Presbyterian Church. In 1940, it was sold to the Catholic Diocese and became Mary Immaculate Church, the Italian parish in Dutchtown. It went through several parish mergers and names—Our Lady, Queen of Peace, being the most recent—before being sold again, and today it serves as Jonah’s Call Anglican Church. The original church is a typical Pittsburgh corner-tower Protestant church, but the Catholics made it their own with some fine sculpture, to which the Anglicans fortunately have no objection. The Catholic congregation also moved the main entrance, which had been in the tower; the old entrance made a good frame for the Blessed Virgin.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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March 30, 2025
Evangelische Imanuel’s Kirche, Dutchtown

Built for a German Reformed congregation, Imanuel Evangelical Church later became a Methodist church, and then an art gallery. This is another city church with the sanctuary upstairs.

The inscription on the front tells us that the church was built in 1859 and rebuilt in 1889. Father Pitt does not know how extensive the rebuilding was, but he might guess that the ground-floor windows on the side, with their angular Gothic arches, were from the 1859 building. The carved stonework ornaments probably date from 1889.

Whenever old Pa Pitt looks into Romanesque foliage and sees somebody looking back at him, he suspects our master of Romanesque grotesqueries, Achille Giammartini.

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The Parkway North just missed this building when it tore Dutchtown in two.

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March 30, 2025
B. F. Jones Mansion, Allegheny West

Rutan & Russell, both of whom had worked for H. H. Richardson, designed this immense Jacobean pile for steel baron Benjamin Franklin Jones, Jr., son of the Jones of Jones & Laughlin. It was finished in 1910. The terra-cotta company must have made its numbers for the entire year supplying the ornaments for this house, right down to the address over the entrance.

The house now belongs to the Community College of Allegheny County, which keeps the exterior perfect.

Even the downspouts are works of art.

March 29, 2025
Endangered Buildings in Carrick

It is never pleasant, but old Pa Pitt feels as though he has a duty to document things that might be gone soon. Sometimes miracles happen, and we can always hope, but without a miracle we can only turn to the photographs to remember what has vanished.

“Berg Place,” a group of three apartment buildings along Brownsville Road in Carrick, probably cannot be saved. It’s a pity, because the buildings, in a pleasant Arts-and-Crafts style flavored with German Art Nouveau, have a commanding position along the street, and their absence will be felt. They were abandoned a few years ago, probably declared unsafe, and since then they have rotted quickly.

Some of the simple but effective Art Nouveau decorations in brick and stone.

These two buildings across the street from Berg Place, damaged by a fire, may possibly still be saved. At present one of them is condemned, but that is not a death sentence, and it looks as though prompt action was taken to secure the one on the corner after the fire. They are typical of the Mission-style commercial buildings that were popular in Carrick and other South Hills neighborhoods, and they ought to be preserved if at all possible. Carrick is not a prosperous neighborhood, but much of the commercial district is still lively, and with the increase in city property values the repairs might be a good investment.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS

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March 29, 2025
House and Corner Store in Dutchtown

A well-preserved pair of houses with a breezeway between them and an old-fashioned storefront. The corner store preserves some memories of the time when it sold auto parts.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Sony Alpha 3000.

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March 29, 2025
The Linwood, North Point Breeze

The Linwood, designed in 1906, is characteristic of Frederick Scheibler in his early-modern phase. You can imagine it being published with approval in one of those German architectural magazines that our local architects occasionally got their hands on. It contained six luxurious apartments, with maids’ quarters, for well-to-do city-dwellers. Although the windows have been replaced and the third-floor balconies have been filled in for sun rooms, the strong lines of the building still make pretty much the same impression they did when it was new. It stands out without offending: it looks like something special, which would be helpful in peddling apartments to the smart set.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10 (all but this picture); Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

These pictures were taken just this afternoon. After a while the rain started to pour. But would that deter old Pa Pitt from getting one more picture? Certainly not! He will dry out eventually.

This is Father Pitt’s first article on anything in North Point Breeze—another neighborhood he has neglected too long. Several other North Point Breeze articles will follow soon.

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March 28, 2025
Three Buildings from the 1880s on Shiloh Street, Mount Washington

Some day some clever inventor will patent a way to match mortar colors in brickwork and make a fortune. (That was sarcasm, by the way: it can be done, but first you have to realize that it ought to be done.) Nevertheless, this building looks much better than it did a few years ago, when the front was covered with aluminum, fake stone, and asphalt shingles. Was it absolutely necessary to brick in all the side windows? Well, probably. Otherwise light might leak in. The original building comes from the 1880s, and the basic outline of it remains Victorian Gothic.

This building also seems to have been put up in the 1880s, or possibly as early as the 1870s. It has been so thoroughly remodeled so often that it would be hard to guess what it looked like originally; Father Pitt’s best guess would be that it had a Second Empire mansard roof and details, replaced in the 1970s by the parody of a Second Empire roof we see today. In the past two decades, the ground floor has been completely redesigned twice; the current incarnation is better than the way it looked twenty years ago.

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Here is a Second Empire building that retains much of its original detail, in spite of the complete remodeling of the ground floor (the original design probably let in far too much natural light) and the artificial siding on the dormers.

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March 28, 2025