McKeesport’s own Charles R. Moffitt, whose office was a short stroll down Walnut street from the construction site, designed this automotive palace for a Studebaker dealer.1 It was built in 1926, and shortly after it opened a picture of the auto-accessories section of the showroom was published in India Rubber and Tire Review for April of 1927:
We can still see the Studebaker emblem at the top of the long side of the building.
A view from a couple of blocks away on Shaw Avenue gives us a better idea of the scale of the building.
The Iron Age, April 15, 1926, p. 1113. “The Ninth Avenue Garage, Ninth Avenue, McKees Rocks [sic], Pa., operated by Baehr Brothers, has plans for a four-story and basement service, repair and garage building, 70 x 140 ft., to cost about $100,000 with equipment. C. R. Moffitt, Masonic Building, is architect.” This listing puts it in “McKees Rocks,” but that’s obviously an editor’s error: there was never a Ninth Avenue in McKees Rocks, and Moffitt was a McKeesport architect, and the dimensions are right for this building. We might add that “Baehr Brothers” is a very unusual name, so unusual that there seems to have been only one automotive-related firm by that name. ↩︎
Casimir Pellegrini Associates were the architects of this church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1963. It was a Franciscan parish until just a few years ago. Unlike some other abandoned Catholic churches, this one has a happy ending: it was bought by the thriving Lebanese Maronite Catholic congregation of Our Lady of Victory, which began in Brookline (or arguably earlier in the Lower Hill) and spent years banished to the wilds of Scott Township. In honor of Pittsburgh’s best Lebanese festival, which begins today and lasts all weekend, here are quite a few pictures of St. Pamphilus/Our Lady of Victory, which old Pa Pitt has done his best to make look like period-appropriate Kennedy-era Kodachrome slides.
The Our Lady of Victory congregation has graciously allowed St. Pamphilus to stay in his home on the front wall of the church, where he distributes bread to begging hands.
Father Pitt will admit that he does not find the nave the most attractive of all our church buildings. It is dignified and spacious, and that is enough. But the tower, a mailbox on stilts, captures his imagination, and he would hate to see anything happen to it.
The church was dedicated to St. Pamphilus, but it is St. Francis who greets you at the door with his usual motto “Pax et bonum.”
This shrine to Our Lady of Victory is now in its third location.
Father Pitt makes it a practice to try to record all the names on a war memorial, because sometimes things happen to inscriptions. If you enlarge this picture, every name should be clearly legible.
A plaque remembers Msgr. Elias P. Basil, the founding pastor of Our Lady of Victory parish. He had been pastor of St. Anne’s, the Maronite church in the Lower Hill. The story is that he promised St. Mary that, if all his parishioners came home safe from the Second World War, he would build a church in her honor. They did, and he did.
St. Anne Church was on Fulton, later Fullerton, Street, one of the Lower Hill streets that no longer exist because they were urban-renewaled to death. This cornerstone was preserved from the demolished church.
N. G. Pollock of Cleveland was the architect of this small but rich-looking bank, which was built in about 1916.1 It seems likely that some sort of ornate classical crest is missing from the corner above the name “First National Bank,” but otherwise the building is in good condition and still in use as a bank.
When our local historians speak of the early adopters of modernism among Pittsburgh’s architects, they usually mention Titus de Bobula, Frederick Scheibler, and Kiehnel & Elliott. Old Pa Pitt would propose to add Charles Bier to that short list. His work is not as imaginative as the best work of Scheibler, but that is about the worst that can be said for him. In the early twentieth century, Bier gave us a large number of buildings influenced by German trends in Art Nouveau, and he developed a distinctive style of his own—one that put an Art Nouveau spin on Jacobean forms. This apartment building is a good sample of his work. It was built in 1910 with six luxurious units.1
The entrance especially looks like something from a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. (We know those German and Austrian art magazines circulated among our architects in Pittsburgh; one of them actually took notice of Frederick Scheibler.) The oversized classical brackets are a whimsical touch.
These lanterns seem to be modern replacements, since ghosts of gaslights are visible behind them.
There’s something pleasingly simple about this little apartment building just off the Potomac Avenue business district in Dormont. There are almost no decorative details, but the simple pilasters that frame the front give the building enough texture to carry itself with dignity. The stone lintels over the windows on the side of the building are a clue to its history: the front is probably a later addition, replacing open balconies with extra rooms. But the matching white brick makes the change hard to detect without some concentration.
The entrance (we are able to peer into the shadows by combining three different exposures in one picture) surprises us with classical woodwork and ornamental leaded glass—another clue that this building is older than we would have thought from a glance at the front.
Shadycrest Village was just beginning construction when it opened for inspection on Valentine’s Day of 1943. The first stage of the development included modest six-room houses like these, done in the cheap and simple 1940s interpretation of the “Colonial” style.
Economical though they were, the houses were up to date, according to the puffery the developers distributed to the papers.
Noteworthy features being built in Shadycrest homes include colonial balustrade stairways, which are wide and easy to climb; improved bathroom fixtures; medicine cabinets, linoleum kitchen and bathroom floors; improved steel casement windows, easy to clean from inside the house, insulted ceilings, Kastone laundry trays, tilt-up garage doors, cabinet sink sets, wallcases edged with non-corrosive metal, and electric ventilating fans.
They also had generous lots to stand on, and—since we were in the middle of the Second World War—the publicity pointed out how much space you would have for a victory garden.
Lots in this development will all be good-sized, ranging from 100 to 200 feet deep. This means that owners will have enough ground for their own victory gardens and can raise their own vegetables.
The location was a big attraction—“so near the downtown district, and above the smog level”—although “6 minutes to downtown” assumes no pauses in driving through the Tubes, which was no more likely in 1943 than it is now.
The development continued to grow, and the larger part of it was made up of five-room double houses in the same simplified Colonial style. These sold rapidly at the end of the war, as returning soldiers looked for places to settle down and raise families.
Cheap though they were, these little houses have aged well. The neighborhood is still very pleasant today, and we notice that many residents still take advantage of the generous lots that come even with the doubles to plant cheerful gardens.
If you visit a friend in Shadycrest, you may need to be very careful about your navigation. The development began on established streets like Tropical Avenue, but as it grew the developers added new winding dead-end streets, and they had to come up with names for them. So…
Shadycrest Drive Shadycrest Road Shadycrest Court Shadycrest Place Shadygrove Avenue Shadyview Place
Finding a house in Shadycrest requires an instinct for pedantic specificity.
Here is another of those apartment buildings that stare back at you when you stare at them.
The St. Regis was built in 1908; the architects were the Chicago firm of Perry & Thomas, who designed several other apartment buildings in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill.
Perry & Thomas seem to have absorbed an eclectic assortment of styles from Beaux Arts through Art Nouveau to Prairie Style. These entrances have the graceful and almost decadent curves we associate with Art Nouveau. They are very similar to the entrance to the Emerson, an apartment building put up two years earlier. That building is attributed to Samuel Crowen, another Chicagoan; but Crowen was associated with Perry & Thomas, and there is certainly a more-than-coincidental resemblance—not only in the entrances, but also in the balconies, which in both buildings are framed by supports ending in decorative faces. The ones on the Emerson are much more abstract, but the idea is the same.
Face on the Emerson.
Faces on the St. Regis.
While taking these pictures, Father Pitt had a short conversation with the maintenance man, who tells us that the apartments were originally big and luxurious, but have been cut down to one and two bedrooms by the present owners. Expensive materials like marble abound inside the building.
The business strip along Walnut Street developed fairly late in the history of Shadyside; much of it was still residential a century ago. If we raise our eyes above ground-floor level, we can see that these little shops are built around a much older house, dating from the 1880s to judge by old maps.
A few blocks eastward on Walnut Street we find a different kind of conversion.
Here is a Second Empire mansion, built in the 1870s, converted to an apartment building, probably in the 1920s. The stucco addition on the front, with its cartoonish half-timbering that looks like a ten-year-old’s idea of Tudor architecture, fits better than it deserves to with the original house thanks to the simple expedient of painting everything white and matching the trim color.
Mount Lebanon Baptist Church has been without a congregation since 2013, but it is kept up, and we hope it has or finds a sympathetic owner. In spite of the name, the church is in Dormont, which was in the “Mount Lebanon district” until it became a separate borough.
The church was put up in 1930; the architects were Lawrence Wolfe (the middle term in a dynasty of Wolfes who were in the architecture business for more than a century) in association with Smith & Reif.
This decoration seems to be meant to represent an outdoor pulpit of the sort that was popular in medieval times. It is not functional, or at least not easily used, but it does send the message that the minister could step out here and denounce the whole borough if it became necessary.
For hardware connoisseurs, here are some very elegant door pulls and locks.
Grape vines in Gothic style make up most of the carved decoration.
