Father Pitt

Tag: Bellinger (Louis)

  • Return of the New Granada

    New Granada Theater

    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.

    New Granada sign

    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.

    New Granada marquee
    New Granada
    New Granada from up the street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    We also have pictures of the Pythian Temple from last year, in the middle of the restoration work.

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  • Pythian Temple, Hill District

    Pythian Temple

    This is the most important remaining work of Louis Bellinger, who for his entire career was the only Black architect in Western Pennsylvania. It was built as the Pythian Temple, an exceptionally grand lodge house. It opened in 1928; but after less than ten years it was sold and became a movie theater, the New Granada, with the ground floor redesigned in streamlined Art Deco by Marks & Kann. Both as a lodge and as a theater it was one of the great jazz venues of all time, and the roster of stars who performed here is long and dazzling—Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and our own Lena Horne, just to name four.

    After half a century of vacancy and multiple schemes for restoration, the New Granada is finally getting the love it deserves. It will have performance spaces and offices, and the whole block has been redeveloped with colorful new apartments and restored older buildings.

    Knight’s helmet in terra cotta

    Except for the ground floor, the building still stands very much as Bellinger designed it. Shields and helmets in terra cotta remind us of the building’s Knights of Pythias origins.

    Shield and helmet
    New Granada Theater
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    In seventeen and a half years of writing about Pittsburgh, few things have made old Pa Pitt happier than seeing the progress on this building. It will stand for years as a tribute to a neglected architect, to the history of the Hill, and to the great legacy of jazz in Pittsburgh.

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  • House by Louis Bellinger in Beltzhoover

    House by Louis A. S. Bellinger

    For his entire career, Louis A. S. Bellinger was the only Black registered architect in western Pennsylvania. His most famous work today is the Pythian Temple, later the New Granada Theater, on the Hill. This is a much smaller project—a six-room house built in 1929 for a middle-class client.1 But the client got his money’s worth. It’s not a work of towering genius: it’s just the best house you could get for the money, designed by a man who knew how to take the ordinary Pittsburgh house and make it a little bit special.

    Arched entrance

    The house is abandoned and overgrown, and it will probably not last much longer. It would take a miracle to save it—a miracle that made the location suddenly valuable, since it will require a nearly complete gutting to put the house back in livable shape. All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists now, so that future historians will know that Louis Bellinger made it.

    85 Sylvania Avenue

    It appears that the house originally had an open porch with an arched entrance; later most of the porch was closed in to make another room. The large window opening in front was a good bit larger when it was an open porch, as we can tell by the slight difference in mortar in the bricks to either side of the window.

    House in context
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
    1. Source: The Charette, January, 1929, p. 12. “602. Architect: Louis A. S. Bellinger, 525 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: Robert T. Smith. Title: One family dwelling, six rooms and bath. Location: 85 Sylvania Ave. Contract awarded to Vincent Mingers. Contract price: $8700.00.” ↩︎
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