Set back in the woods along Pioneer Avenue, this house obviously belongs to a different era. It looks like a typical Pennsylvania farmhouse, because—as far as we can tell from old maps—that is what it was: an I-house with a plantation-style colonnaded porch added in a moment of prosperity. The Knowlsons owned much of the land that became southwestern Brookline, and they gave the neighborhood its name. They certainly did prosper when they sold their land to developers, along with their relatives the Flemings.
A few details of the Union Trust Building, designed by Pierre A. Liesch when he was working for Frederick Osterling—at least according to Liesch; the building is usually just credited to Osterling.
For good reason old Pa Pitt didn’t publish these pictures when he took them eleven years ago. They were blurry and grainy and ugly, and if you enlarge them you can see that everything he did to rescue them was at most partly successful. But at the time he did not know that this old Russian church would be demolished about three years later. Since he ran across these pictures again today, he decided that, as poor as they are, they can stand here for a memorial to one of the dwindling number of mementos of the Hill’s days as a lively polyglot mishmash of every ethnic group.
O. M. Topp, the favorite architect of Lutherans in Pittsburgh for a generation, designed this magnificent Romanesque church, which was built in 1927–19281 and seems almost like a tribute to the late John T. Comès, who had died five years earlier. Topp almost always designed churches in the Gothic style, but here he takes up Romanesque and shows that he can be a master of it, right down to the polychrome stripes that Comès loved so well.
The entrance on the Stewart Avenue side is perhaps the stripiest ecclesiastical structure in the city of Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation identifies Topp as the architect of the main church. The Sunday-school wing was built shortly afterward. Source: The Charette, October, 1927: “359. Architect: O. M. Topp, Jenkins Arcade, Pittsburgh, Pa. Title: Stewart Ave. Lutheran Church, Sunday School. Location: Stewart Ave. and Brownsville Road. Ready for bids Sept. 19th. Approximate size: Two stories; brick, wood and steel. Cubage: 125,000 cu. ft.” ↩︎
The post office in Mount Oliver has been peripatetic if we take a long-term view. It began a few doors north of here on Brownsville Road in a little brick building later replaced by a furniture store. In about 1905, this substantial “flatiron” building went up at the complicated intersection of Brownsville Road, Amanda Street/Avenue (the border between Mount Oliver, which calls it an avenue, and Pittsburgh, which calls it a street), Bausman Street, Sherman Avenue, and Hays Avenue.
From a 1905 Hopkins plat map. Note the “P. O.” at the corner of Murry Alley, and this triangular building marked as “New P. O.,” suggesting that it was under construction when the map was drawn.
Now the post office is in a much larger modernist building two blocks up Brownsville Road. But this building still stands in reasonably good condition.
The Chamber of Commerce Building seems to be neglected in Pittsburgh lore; nobody mentions it, and in fact the Skyscraper Page Pittsburgh skyscraper diagram skips right over it, ignoring it completely, though the diagram includes a number of considerably smaller and shorter buildings. Even old Pa Pitt has never featured this building before, mostly because it is difficult to get a picture of the whole building. So here is an illustration of the building when it was new; it has changed very little. It is easier to pick out details with a versatile lens, so here are a few of the interesting decorations. The architects were Edward B. Lee, who moved his office into the building when it was finished, and James P. Piper.
This building stands out among the skyscrapers that surround it like a strange relic of a lost civilization—the pre-skyscraper age. It was built in 1890, and the architect was young Frederick Osterling. He would soon master the Richardsonian Romanesque style and become one of our most accomplished practitioners of it, but this is pre-Richardsonian Romanesque. The weighty but graceful eyebrows over the arches, the complex and irregular rhythm of different sizes, and the surprising but flowing curves all remind us of Osterling’s old master Joseph Stillburg, whose Romanesque ideas went back to his native Austria.
With no other preface, we present a few of the pictures from 2025 that pleased old Pa Pitt the most, beginning with the Pittsburgh Gage & Supply Co., Strip District.
United Steelworkers Building (built as the IBM Building).
Lake Elizabeth, West Park (North Side), on a winter afternoon.
Green tulip.
Buildings by Tasso Katselas at the main campus of the Community College of Allegheny County.
Tiny mushroom on a twig.
Crafton Station on the West Busway, with St. Philip’s Church in the background.
Crafton Borough Building.
Rainbow terrace on Dawson Street in Oakland.
Apartment building on College Street, Shadyside.
Tower of St. Pamphilus Church, Beechview.
Entrance to Fifth Avenue Place.
Light and shade at the CNG Tower, now known as EQT Plaza.
Wilkinsburg Station.
Bernard Gloeckler Co. warehouse, Strip District.
McBride Building. This looks like a fairly ordinary photograph of a building, but a lot of technical fussing went into making the perspective look anything like normal, since the picture had to be taken from very close.
Liberty Bridge.
Wilkinsburg Masonic Temple.
Japanese maple in the South Side Cemetery.
Nodding Foxtail (Setaria faberi).
An Art Deco urn at the Beechwood School in Beechview.
The CNG Tower, now known as EQT Plaza.
A house in Beverly Heights, Mount Lebanon.
The Hall of Sculpture at the Carnegie. The picture was taken with the ultra-wide auxiliary camera on Father Pitt’s phone, so it looks lousy enlarged, but at a small size it seems like a nice composition.
A bungalow in Beechview. The snow and the colors seemed to capture the essence of a winter afternoon.
Charles J. Palmgreen was the architect of this fine Jacobean structure, which looks so much like a school that old Pa Pitt spent an hour trying to figure out which school it was before finally finding a picture of it in the Pittsburgh Press for March 23, 1927, which identified the building.
“The office of the Universal Steel Co. on Station st., the most impressive office building in Bridgeville.”
The terra-cotta decorations were supplied by the Corning Terra Cotta Company of Corning, New York, which we know from a booklet published by the company that listed dozens of buildings, including their architects, which is where we got the attribution to Mr. Palmgreen.
This was a “hotel” in the old Pittsburgh sense, which is to say a neighborhood bar with rooms upstairs to qualify it for a “hotel” liquor license, which was much easier to get than a liquor license for a bar. The last time we saw the Rodler Hotel, about ten years ago, it appeared to be abandoned; but now it has new windows and is stabilized and occupied. The collapsing aluminum awnings have also been removed.
The corner entrance was filled in years ago to make a vestibule. Father Pitt prefers corner entrances left open, but he was not the owner of the building.
