Homewood is showing considerable signs of revitalization, but there are still long stretches of what used to be the commercial district that are nearly deserted. Here is a block of Frankstown Avenue that seems typical of the area: about a third of the buildings demolished, a third abandoned, and a third still inhabited and straggling along. We begin with an apartment building with two storefronts that has been kept standing by low-budget renovations.
The private club “WEMCO” seems to be thriving, and the small apartment building that goes with it is not only well maintained but also kept scrupulously tidy.
Two abandoned buildings that will probably be taken down sooner or later. Because they have been abandoned, they preserve details that might otherwise have been replaced by cheap renovations.
Here is an interesting answer to the question of how to make attractive dwellings over a storefront. The grand arched entrance to the apartments sets them apart from the business downstairs and makes them feel like a real home, not a temporary way station.
Built in 1896, this eclectic pile seems not to be in use right now, but it is not in terribly bad shape. It was built as the Second Presbyterian Church of Braddock, but later took the name Calvary Presbyterian. Old Pa Pitt spent some time trying to figure out who designed the building, but none of the newspaper articles he found mentioned an architect.
These stubby entrance towers, with their double eyebrowed round windows, trigger a disturbing pareidolia in Father Pitt’s brain.
On the other hand, the whole building was worth putting up just to display this fan window.
The church is separated by less than a yard from its neighbor, the historically Black New Hope Baptist Church. It illustrates an interesting fact of social history: the separation of Black and White residents into different neighborhoods was largely a development of the second half of the twentieth century, and it was largely a conscious decision of the powers that were. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, our urban neighborhoods were the proverbial melting pots of all nations and races.
This building has been slowly crumbling for many years now, and it has finally reached a stage where reasonable people agree nothing can be done to save it. According to neighborhood gossip, it was estimated that five million dollars would be needed just to stabilize the structure, and no one has five million to spend on a big church in Manchester.
It is part of the curious paradox of Manchester that this church stands on Liverpool Street right next to perhaps the finest and best-restored block of Victorian rowhouses in Pittsburgh. “A building like this anchors the community,” one neighbor told old Pa Pitt—“even in this condition.”
St. Joseph’s was built in 1897 for a German parish. The architect, as we might guess from the picturesque style and the buff brick, was Frederick Sauer.1
When the parish closed, the building was sold to a nondenominational congregation, but the same neighborhood gossip tells us that the congregation struggled even to pay utility bills. After it folded, the building stood vacant, and suffered the usual piecemeal destruction of a large vacant building.
A few days ago, Father Pitt passed by on Liverpool Street and saw the big red sticker on the door. It was pouring down rain at the time, but he went back the next morning to document the church before it disappears, which is why we have more than fifty pictures to show you.
Charles J. Rieger, late in a distinguished career (we first notice him in construction listings nearly forty years earlier), designed this Art Deco palace of education, which was built in 1938. It has been abandoned for years. In a trendy neighborhood, the building would make fine luxury apartments, and it could have a rehabilitation that would make the most of its classy Deco streamlining. This part of Braddock, however, is not likely to require luxury apartments in the near future.
This was perhaps the last church designed by Titus de Bobula in his short architectural career, and it was an extraordinary work. It was faced entirely with concrete, and the architect gave free rein to his love of sweeping curves and tapering forms—note, for example, how the continuous tapering of the tower was supplemented by an inverted tapering of the arch at the entrance.
In the 1950s, the congregation built a much larger church from a design by the prolific Monessen church architect H. Ernest Clark. But the old church was kept as a social hall, and—thanks to the eagle eye of our correspondent David Schwing—we have discovered that the building is still standing.
Almost everything that made the church a unique work of art is gone. The windows are blocked in; the decorations are stripped off; the spire is gone and the tower truncated. But we can still see the outline of that unique arch at the entrance. And this is the only one of Titus de Bobula’s concrete-faced churches to have survived at all—at least as far as old Pa Pitt knows. With just a few minutes to stop in Glassport on his way from here to there, Father Pitt took a bunch of pictures with three different cameras to document the church before it succumbs to complete decay.
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.
Built in 1907–1908, this splendid bathhouse was designed by Carpenter & Crocker,1 who did the whole ground-floor front in terra cotta.
This bathhouse served Soho, once a crowded neighborhood of tiny houses, many without indoor plumbing; long lines would form on Saturday nights as the working classes took their one chance to get clean. Almost all the houses are gone, and most of the other buildings, leaving overgrown foundations; this stretch of Fifth Avenue is spookily deserted. Even the neighborhood has ceased to exist in Pittsburghers’ imaginations. Soho once referred to the area around the north end of today’s Birmingham Bridge, but there is no such place now on city planning maps. What used to be Soho is divided officially between “Bluff,” “West Oakland,” and “South Oakland.” Soho is generally mentioned only when Andy Warhol comes up, because he was born there; but if you ask where Soho was, Wikipedia will tell you it is a synonym for Uptown, which it will also tell you is the same as the Bluff. (In fact the house where Andy Warhol was born, now a patch of woods on a deserted street, is in the part designated West Oakland by the city.)
This building was in use more recently than most, but it, too, has been left to rot. It is one of only three or four standing public baths in the city, only one of which—the Oliver Bathhouse—is still serving its original purpose.
Old Pa Pitt painted out the close-up graffiti in this picture, because they were distracting, and because if street gangs want to advertise on his site, they can pay for it.
The Atlas Theatre opened in 1915 as the Perrysville but was almost immediately put up for sale and renamed the Atlas. It was remodeled with Art Deco front in 1938. The last movie it showed, in 1953, was Bonzo Goes to College. Apparently that killed it. After that, it was a retail store for a while, but it has been many years since anything inhabited this building.
Walking down Perrysville Avenue one day not long ago, Father Pitt spotted a distinctive outline through the branches. It was the tower of a Second Empire mansion.
Old Pa Pitt was very excited. Here was a Second Empire mansion he had not known about before. That was very interesting. He started investigating, and found that the discovery was actually much more interesting than that.
Historians of Perry Hilltop are earnestly invited to help us out with the history of this house, which has caught old Pa Pitt’s imagination. The house is in deplorable shape—especially the side you can see through the overgrown shrubbery from Perrysville Avenue, where billows of garbage seem to be spilling out of the building.
But what is fascinating is that, where old Pa Pitt expected a Second Empire mansion, he found something much older. The shallow pitch of the roof and the broad expanse of flat white board underneath the roofline say “Greek Revival” in a loud voice.
This appears to be the side of the house, although Father Pitt has reason for believing that it was originally the front. The large modern Perrysville Plaza apartment building is next to it, but walking around to the back of that building reveals the front of the house—with its distinctive Second Empire tower.
The tower is pure Second Empire, but the roof still says Greek Revival. The house must have been Second Empired, probably in the 1880s. The attic windows in the gable ends were added then: they match the ones in the tower.
The Second Empire remodeling was not the last big change. You may have noticed that there is something a little off about the brick walls. This appears to have been a frame house originally. Old plat maps show it as a frame house through 1910; later maps show it as brick. A brick veneer must have been added at some time around the First World War. The new brick walls swallowed all the window frames and other trim that would have given us more clues about the original date.
There was a house here belonging to the “Boyle Heirs” in 1872, the earliest plat map we have found. An 1882 map shows a carriage drive leading to the plank road that became Perrysville Avenue, with a circle at the end of the house near the road—bolstering old Pa Pitt’s guess that the end was originally the front.
There are few Second Empire mansions remaining in Pittsburgh, and even fewer Greek Revival ones. This house ought to be preserved, but it probably will not be. The neighborhood is neglected enough that it has not even been condemned yet, which means that it will continue to decay until either it becomes an intolerable nuisance or the land becomes valuable enough to build something else on. Father Pitt will label it Critically Endangered.
All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists, and Father Pitt has done the best he can do without trespassing.
This building has been neglected for decades, but it was solidly constructed and has suffered less than we might think from that neglect. It’s for sale right now, and it would be a splendid meeting hall for your lodge. All you have to do is found a lodge, and make sure to invite people with money to be your charter members.
Addendum: The architect was C. G. Mentel; the building was put up in 1904.1
Father Pitt took some pictures of this building back in 1999, and it is surprising how little it has changed since then—either for the better or for the worse.
