The tower of St. Bernard’s peers over the trees in Mount Lebanon, brought to you in old-postcard colors thanks to the Two-Strip Technicolor plugin for the GIMP.
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Four Gateway Center
The gleam of early-morning sun warms the chilly modernist elegance of Four Gateway Center. This 1960 modernist tower is one of a number of contributions to our skyline by Harrison & Abramovitz, whose most notable (which is to say inescapable) work in Pittsburgh is the U. S. Steel Tower.
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Reflections in the Software Engineering Institute
Three landmark buildings reflected in a corner of the Software Engineering Institute on Fifth Avenue: St. Paul’s Cathedral, Webster Hall, and the Mellon Institute.
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Three Gateway Center
Three Gateway Center (1952, architects Eggers & Higgins), seen down the western end of Forbes Avenue from the Diamond. The distinctive stainless-steel facing of the first three Gateway Center towers was an afterthought, and a very lucky one. They were to be faced with brick, which would have made them humdrum undistinguished vertical warehouses like a thousand other modernist cruciform brick towers around the world. But bricks were in short supply after the Second World War, and for once budget constraints led to a much more pleasing result.
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Dormont Presbyterian Church
The old Dormont Presbyterian Church dominates the business district on Potomac Avenue, making that corner of Dormont look almost like a medieval English city. The church was built in 1923 (or in 1907, with an expansion in 1923; Pa Pitt’s sources are a little fuzzy). The Presbyterians, along with the Baptists and Methodists, threw in the towel in 2013, and this is now a branch of North Way Christian Community.
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House on Carson Street
Carson Street is the commercial spine of the South Side, but occasionally we run across a house left over from the time before Carson was almost exclusively commercial. Most of them have small offices on the ground floors now, but they retain their domestic external appearance. This house strikes Father Pitt as a halfway point between Second Empire and Italianate styles in local rowhouses; it’s notable for its prickly decorative ironwork on the roof.
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Music Building, University of Pittsburgh
Built in 1884, this was originally a mansion designed by the prolific and always tasteful firm of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow. It was a gift from his wife to the pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church across the street. It pays to marry a millionaire’s daughter.
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St. George’s Church, Allentown
St. George’s was the center of the prosperous German Catholic community in Allentown. It was designed by Herman Lang of the firm of Edmund B. Lang & Brother (presumably Herman was the Brother) and completed in 1912. Its spires dominate the neighborhood, and indeed can be seen for miles from other hilltop sites. But the congregation is gone. It was merged into St. John Vianney parish, and then the St. George worship site was closed in 2016. A preservation society has been trying to keep the building alive, but this is an endangered landmark. (Update: We had linked to the site for the preservation society, but it has vanished from the Web. There may be some activity on Facebook, which old Pa Pitt refuses to join because it would suck the rest of his time down the drain.)
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The Mellon Institute
Benno Janssen, whose many designs helped define the Oakland Civic Center, created perhaps his most monumental work here. The huge columns are cut from single pieces of stone—the largest monolithic columns in the history of the world. And Father Pitt, through the magic of computer stitching software, brings you perhaps the only complete face-on photo of the block-long Fifth Avenue façade on the entire Internet. Below, a picture from the corner of Bellefield and Fifth.
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Hollywood Theater, Dormont
Almost every neighborhood in Pittsburgh and the urban inner suburbs had a neighborhood movie house—or several of them—in the silent-movie era, and many of those buildings are still standing (here are all of old Pa Pitt’s articles on movie theaters). What is nearly unique about the Hollywood, built in 1925, is that it is still showing movies. In fact it shows first-run movies these days, with occasional classic revivals, and a theater-organ performance every once in a while. The Theatre Historical Society of America bought the place in 2018, and we can hope that they will be able to keep it going for many years.
We can see from this picture that the building has gone through some renovations over the decades, not all of them sympathetic. But the basic outline has not changed. For some reason Mission style was very popular in Dormont in the 1920s, and the Hollywood’s movie-lot interpretation of Spanish-colonial architecture is very appropriate for its setting and use.
A detailed history of the theater is at Cinema Treasures. The theater is just a few steps away from the Potomac station on the Red Line.
