A quarter-century ago, the O’Reilly opened with a brand-new play by August Wilson (King Hedley II). That makes it a newcomer by Penn Avenue standards. But Penn Avenue has been the heart of the theater district for a century and a half, and the O’Reilly stands on the exact site of Library Hall, whose auditorium was used as the Bijou, Victorian Pittsburgh’s most prestigious theater, where touring stars like Dion Boucicault played. The site had been a parking lot for more than sixty years before the O’Reilly was built, but we can think of this theater as continuing the Bijou tradition.
The building was designed by Michael Graves, the postmodernist whose brand of neoneoclassicism was influential in the movement. Mr. Graves also designed Theater Square next door, which houses the Greer Cabaret and a well-dressed parking garage.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
Old Pa Pitt has been dumping quite a load of pictures in these pages for the past few days. He realized that the pictures have been backing up and decided he ought to try to catch up with them. But how backed up were they? Here is a picture of the O’Reilly taken with a Kodak Signet 40 in June of 2000, when the building was only six months old. Father Pitt has never published it here before.
A while ago, Father Pitt took a walk on Thomas Boulevard in the light rain, so don’t be surprised to see raindrops in some of these pictures. Thomas Boulevard, like McPherson Boulevard, has an eclectic mixture of housing from duplexes through Shingle-style mansions to medium-sized apartment buildings. Today we’re concentrating on the houses, some of which are magnificent. Above, a Shingle-style house with all its shingles in place.
If you ever asked yourself how much difference materials really make in the appearance of a house, compare this Shingle-style house, where the shingles have been replaced with fake siding and paste-on shutters, to the one above.
A typical Pittsburgh Renaissance palace that has turned into an apartment building.
A house with Queen Anne outlines that has been modernized with reasonably good taste.
This frame house was in deplorable condition before it was updated and made to look like a product of the twenty-first century. You can look on Google Street View to see the specific meaning old Pa Pitt assigns to “deplorable.” With an unlimited budget, Father Pitt would prefer to restore a house like this to its original design. With a limited budget, this was a good result.
This turret with house attached needs some rescuing. It has what the real-estate people call good bones, and that turret ought to be attractive to a well-off eccentric now that the neighborhood is on the upswing.
A big center-hall house that is now solar-powered.
A stony foursquare with Queen Anne details. It has lost its porch, but the third floor retains fine original woodwork and windows.
A center-hall colonial from early in the Colonial Revival, when Georgian was filtered through a late-Victorian lens.
This is a variation on the same plan as the previous house, which is right next to it; they were probably built at the same time and designed by the same hand. The porch has been replaced with a modern construction that does not quite fit, but the house looks much better with this porch than it would look with no porch at all.
This towering center-hall manse makes spectacular use of Kittanning brick in Frederick Sauer’s favorite color. The beefiness of it, along with the well-balanced selection of picturesque details, makes us think that Sauer is a good suspect for the architect.
This house grew a large balcony when it was turned into a duplex.
A big square house with typical Queen Anne details, especially the little balcony and the curved surfaces covered with shingles.
The Brookline Theatre on Brookline Boulevard in Brookline was a typical neighborhood movie house of the silent era. According to Ed Blank, the well-known newspaper critic, who has made a thorough study of Pittsburgh movie houses, it opened on March 28, 1921. It ceased to show movies about half a century ago, and since then has had a varied career as a thrift shop, a bar, and currently a sports bar with two competing cell-phone dealers. The Mission style of the building, with its tiled overhang and exaggerated wooden brackets, was popular in the 1920s, especially in the South Hills neighborhoods.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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