The glass front with a semicircular end was very popular in the era of streamlined midcentury modernity. This storefront, which has been vacant since Anthon’s moved out, preserves its moderne look almost perfectly, and we hope the next tenants will appreciate it.
The restoration of the New Granada, built as the Pythian Temple, is nearly complete. For decades there has always been a plan to restore the New Granada, and it has always fallen into the Slough of Despond, and the building has stood as a silent accusation, pointing a mocking finger at our failures as a community. But we have successes, too; and if this project was thirty or forty years in getting to this point, it did get to this point.
The New Granada was originally built in 1928 as the Pythian Temple, a lodge for the Knights of Pythias. The architect was Louis Bellinger, the only Black registered architect in Western Pennsylvania for his entire career. Above the first floor, the building is mostly unchanged from the way Bellinger drew it. The lodge did not survive the Depression; in 1937 the building was remodeled as a theater with a new Art Deco base by Alfred Marks of Marks & Kann. As the New Granada, it quickly became one of Pittsburgh’s top venues for jazz stars, and every great Black performer of the era stopped here.
A commercial building on Penn Avenue with a well-preserved terra-cotta front whose distinctive Art Deco decorations were worth picking out with a long lens.
This is the newest of the three-building complex: the original King Edward Apartments, the King Edward Annex, and this King Edward, built in 1930. Walter Perry of Chicago was the architect of this palatial addition to John McSorley’s empire of apartment buildings. It was front-page news on and off when it was new, and not in a good way: some miscalculation in the surveying seems to have ended with a few inches of this building encroaching on the property to the left. That property owner was a cantankerous and litigious sort who refused all McSorley’s offers for the land; it seems he was hoping for a big payout if he went to court. To forestall the lawsuit, McSorley had a crew start chiseling several inches of brick off the end of the building—but then the property owner claimed he was trespassing and got an injunction to stop the work.
Just to make sure that the temporary injunction handed down in common pleas court yesterday is observed, agents for the property at 214-216 North Craig street erected another barricade to keep workmen from chipping bricks off the north wall of the King Edward apartments addition. The workmen lost in their race to forestall a lawsuit because the addition encroaches several inches onto the other property and Judge H. H. Rowand ordered them not to trespass. The new barricades are shown above. Damage done by falling bricks to the roof and awning of the duplex may be seen in the picture.
This snappy-looking modernistic school was designed by Button & McLean (Lamont H. Button and Paul F. McLean), who were taking bids in November of 1938.1 It was later bought by the Steel Valley Council of Governments, an association of boroughs and cities in the Mon Valley, which has turned it into a shop where you can take your humans to have them serviced.
When old Pa Pitt took these pictures, there was a band rehearsing somewhere in the building that included a pretty good vibraphone player.
Proposals, Pittsburgh Press, November 30, 1938, p. 32. “Copies of plans, specifications and other contract documents will be on file and open to public inspection at the offices of the Architects, 119 East Montgomery Avenue, North Side, Pittsburgh, Pa.…” From many other listings we know that 119 East Montgomery Avenue—a street that no longer exists—was the office of Button & McLean. ↩︎
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.
The main tower of Allegheny General is one of the few classic skyscrapers outside downtown, and a landmark of Art Deco in Pittsburgh, as well as a landmark of the style Father Pitt calls Mausoleum-on-a-Stick, where the top of the tower is modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It was designed by York & Sawyer, who made a specialty of hospitals, and built in 1930. Today we’re going to pay particular attention to the grand entrance on North Avenue, which is covered with extravagant terra-cotta decorations, so we have more than thirty pictures to show you.
Pittsburgh’s own Harry H. Lefkowitz was the architect of this futuristic tower of furniture, which was built in 1941. The building is one of the chief landmarks of the moderne style in the Pittsburgh area, and by sheer luck it has not been too much damaged over its eighty-five years of existence. It is an astonishing thing to come across while walking or driving through the almost deserted business district of Braddock. Now, at last, it is appreciated: it has been restored, complete with its spectacular sign, as artist residences, and as much of the original modernistic appeal as possible has been kept intact.
Old Pa Pitt has been wandering in Braddock, and we’ll see many pictures in the next few weeks. Some of what we’ll see is sad, so we begin with good news to show that there are people who love Braddock and have hope for its future.
The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was the big science museum on the North Side before it merged with the Carnegie and moved into the Science Center.
For a while the Art Deco classical building, designed by Ingham & Boyd (or Ingham, Boyd & Pratt; Father Pitt is not sure when Pratt came into the partnership) was sparsely used for classes and other activities, but after the Carnegie moved everything into the Science Center, the Children’s Museum took over the building for a huge expansion.
