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Bold Baking Corp., Allentown
While looking at old plat maps for information about some of the buildings he had photographed in Allentown, Father Pitt noticed a commercial bakery in the narrow back streets. In the satellite view, it was still there, so naturally old Pa Pitt had to see it the next time he was in Allentown. It is now inhabited by a real-estate company and a maker of hand-crafted candles.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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South Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, Wilkinsburg
Wilkinsburg’s own Milligan & Miller designed this rambling Gothic church, which is still in use by its original congregation, now South Avenue United Methodist. “One of the most important additions to the structural beauty of the place,” said a 1907 Pittsburg Press feature on Wilkinsburg,1 “will be the new South Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, which is to replace the old burned down last February. It is to cost $125,000 and will be one of the finest church buildings in the community. The construction is under the charge of Architects Milligan & Miller, who designed the plans.”
Impressive stone lanterns flank the front steps.
Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100. An arcaded porch after the manner of a medieval cloister runs along the side.
- “Old Town of Aspect All Modern,” Press, July 14, 1907. ↩︎
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Trio of Small Apartment Buildings on Neville Street, Oakland
Father Pitt is not sure whether these three buildings were originally built as apartments or as single houses, but he is almost positive they were built as rental properties. Old maps tell a clear story: at some point a little before 1910, T. Herriott, who owned a house to the right of these buildings (where the Mark Twain Apartments are now), bought his neighbor’s large lot, demolished the frame house on it, and had these three buildings put up, which he continued to own at least through 1923. They obviously had porches, since the scars where the porch roofs were removed are covered with vertical clapboards.
The Flemish-bond brickwork is arranged with the headers in a different color, so that it looks surprisingly like Wikipedia’s color-coded diagram of Flemish bond:
Brickwork in Flemish bond, by Jonathan Riley, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. 
Kodak EasyShare Z981.
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Apartments in the Watkins Development, Squirrel Hill
This quiet enclave of small apartment buildings is part of the same “city set on a hill” development as the Morrowfield, and the buildings were probably also designed by J. E. Dwyer. They’re fairly ordinary Pittsburgh buildings of the early 1920s, Mission style with a bit of Romanesque thrown in. They look their best in black and white.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Digimax V4.
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Duplex in Beechview by W. A. Thomas
William Arthur Thomas designed this First-World-War-era duplex,1 which is typical of the better class of Pittsburgh duplexes: it offers two spacious apartments (plus attic and basement), each with more square footage than many city houses. Thomas was very fond of white Kittanning brick, to judge by the number of his buildings that made use of it.
Nikon COOLPIX P100; Olympus E-20N.
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Two Beaux-Arts Survivors on Penn Avenue
Doubtless built for very pedestrian commercial uses—with huge windows that provided bright light from the south all day—these two buildings nevertheless could not be seen in public until they were dressed in the proper Beaux-Arts fashion. Other more recent buildings grew up around them and then were torn down, but these have survived, and seemed to be getting some work when Father Pitt walked past them recently.
Both buildings pull from the same repertory of classical ornaments in terra cotta, but mix them up in different ways.
No. 819 is more heavily ornamented—both in the sense of the abundance of ornaments and in the sense that the individual ornaments seem weightier:
No. 821, on the other hand, is decorated with a lighter and more Baroque touch:
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Limbach Building, Allentown
The Limbach Building is a good representative of what has been going on in Allentown over the past few years. Allentown was traditionally a German neighborhood, and the Limbach Building is a well-preserved example of the style old Pa Pitt calls German Victorian. Above we see it as it was just a few days ago; below in July of 2021. The building is in better shape now, and the downstairs tenant—a gym called “Death Comes Lifting,” whose slogan is “Fitness for the Misfits”—is weirder. Thus the whole progress of the Allentown business district is epitomized in one building: better and weirder.
It is especially cheering to see that someone is taking good care of the distinctive dome on the turret. The building would lose half its German flavor without that detail.
Kodak EasyShare Z981; Nikon COOLPIX P100. Old Pa Pitt is also happy that the corner entrance has never been filled in.
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