A tidy four-unit building fitting a lot of living space into a small lot. The style is very simple, but little details—the suggestion of battlements in the roofline, rectangles and a diamond of terra cotta—give what would otherwise be a prosaic building some romantic appeal. It’s about time for the awning man to come by and take those awnings down for their winter cleaning.
After months of work, the Hollywood, Dormont’s century-old neighborhood movie palace, is open again as the Row House Hollywood, showing an eclectic mixture of classic movies, cult films, and independent productions. As a rare undivided big-screen theater, the Hollywood is big enough to accommodate special performances, like a showing of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc with the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh.
Charles R. Geisler designed the original 1925 building (the Spanish Mission details are certainly his); Victor A. Rigaumont, Pittsburgh’s titan of Deco theaters, supervised a remodeling in 1948.
The Hollywood is an easy stroll from the Potomac station on the Red Line. There are also public parking lots nearby for the carbound, but isn’t half the fun of visiting a silent-era movie palace using a period-appropriate transit line to get there?
Wilkinsburg used to call itself “City of Churches,” and it still has a denser concentration of great church architecture than almost any other neighborhood or borough. This one is battered but still hanging on, now as the Arc of the Covenant Church. The building dates from 1896–1897; the architect mentioned in contemporary listings was Elmer B. Milligan,1 who would soon take on Francis M. Miller as a partner—probably while this church was under construction, since a fortieth-anniversary program names Milligan & Miller as the architects.
The colossal octagonal lantern is the most striking feature of the church: there’s nothing else like it in Wilkinsburg.
Father Pitt took his new old Kodak superzoom to the South Side Cemetery to try it out. These pictures of St. Basil’s Church are not cropped; the lens has a very long range, although there are more recent superzoom cameras with even longer ranges. Herman J. Lang was the architect of the church.
These two buildings probably date from the 1880s. Though they were identical, they seem always to have been under separate ownership. At Pittsburgh Historic Maps, they first appear on the 1890 layer as belonging to Elizabeth Fisher (the building on the left) and Mary A. Curtis. The ground floors have been altered a bit, but the upper floors retain much of their original detail.
The Wilkinsburg borough building, which also houses the library, was designed by Theodore Eichholz in 1938, at the height of the mania for Colonial American architecture spurred by the restoration of Williamsburg. It opened on the first day of 1940.1 In these past two years it has been getting some restoration, including replacement of those tall columns, which are made of wood. The old ones had rotted; these new ones, carefully duplicating the originals, are supposedly treated to prevent rot—although if you only have to replace your wooden columns once every eighty-five years, you’re not doing too badly.
An attractively modernistic little apartment building—Father Pitt would guess it dates from about 1940—in good shape, with not too many alterations. Small details like decorative brickwork elevate it from mundane to elegant. And note the corner windows, the badge of mid-century modernity.
This impressive portal, wide enough to drive a large delivery wagon through, leads to the central courtyard.
Aside from what you see in the pictures, old Pa Pitt knows nothing about this building on Brownsville Road. It was probably put up in the 1920s, and it has the look of a car dealer. But it really looks like nothing else in Pittsburgh, and the current owners seem to appreciate its uniqueness. The most striking feature, of course, is that organ-pipe crest, which reminds Father Pitt of the purely ornamental “pipe tops” that used to be fashionable on Victorian reed organs.
