Father Pitt

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Front Doors of the South Side

The famous Victorian front doors of the South Side are featured on posters and in picture books on coffee tables all over western Pennsylvania. There is an endless variety to the woodwork on these South Side rowhouses. Old Pa Pitt was out walking on the South Side and decided to concentrate on doors: here is the collection he made in just half an hour’s stroll. Click on any picture to enlarge it.

Many of these doorways have decorative stained-glass transoms over the door, often with the address worked into the glass:

Of course, no collection of South Side front doors would be complete without a Kool Vent awning on an alley house:

October 5, 2019
Tower of St. Bernard’s, Mount Lebanon

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.

October 5, 2019
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.

October 5, 2019
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.

October 2, 2019
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.

October 2, 2019
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.

October 1, 2019
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.

October 1, 2019
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.

September 30, 2019
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.)

Map

September 30, 2019
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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September 30, 2019