Old maps seem to show that this house was built in the 1880s. The storefront is probably a later addition put on when Brownsville Road became the main shopping street of Mount Oliver. It has been very neatly refurbished for its current tenant, a gourmet cheese shop called “The Cheese Queen.” But before its windows were replaced a few years ago, the upper floors had the kind of three-over-one windows that were popular in the 1920s, just when the commercial strip on Brownsville Road was rapidly developing. Those two observations probably date the time this typical 1800s Pittsburgh frame house was converted to a store with apartment above.
Almost by accident the Mount Oliver Municipal Building is a very attractive little building. It probably dates from the middle 1920s, and it was designed with minimal decoration but a tasteful attention to detail—note the brick pilasters that frame the façade and the little brickwork ornaments above the inscription, two small touches that preserve the building from banality. The front has been modernized, but the newer doors and windows fit into the building well and accent the form of it; too often we see renovations that ignore the rest of the building. We should also not neglect to point out that the two inscriptions are just about perfect, simple but in exactly the right spots, and with the letters spaced just right.
The borough of Mount Oliver puts up very tasteful greenery along Brownsville Road for the Christmas season, and a fine Christmas tree next to the municipal building.
This storefront on Brownsville Road has layers of history. The original 1920 building must have been an interesting design; enough remains to show us that somebody tried hard to make it distinctive and up to date.
The ground floor looks like a postwar remodeling, and a well-preserved inscription in the floor of the entrance tells us that it was a shop called Harvard’s.
As Mount Oliver trendifies, this storefront may become more desirable, and if you are the owner of a small business moving in, old Pa Pitt has a suggestion: whatever your business is, call it “Harvard’s.” You then have a ready-made logo, as well as a distinctive sidewalk inscription to welcome your customers. It would be an especially good name for the intellectual sort of used bookstore.
Father Pitt had to stand in the street and risk the wrath of the No. 51 bus to get this picture, but that is the kind of effort he is willing to make for you, his faithful readers.
Now Zion Christian Church. The cornerstone tells us that the congregation was founded in 1908, and its first building was at the corner of Birmingham Avenue and Hays Avenue (now Amanda Street)—a small frame chapel that must have quickly become woefully overcrowded, since this building many times the size was constructed less than twenty years later.
Plat map showing the original location of Bethel Baptist.
“The membership is 381, as compared with a membership of 30 in 1908,” says the Gazette Times of February 18, 1925, when the plans for the new building were announced.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, February 18, 1925
The architect was Walter H. Gould, “a member of the church,” and so far this is the only building attributed to him that Father Pitt knows about. However, it is an accomplished if not breathtakingly original design, so there must be other Gould buildings lurking about, probably in the South Hills neighborhoods. Comparing the published rendering above with the church as it stands today shows us that the tower grew about a floor’s worth of height between conception and construction—a rare example, perhaps, of an architect being told that his original design was not ambitious enough.
There’s nothing particularly special about this house, except that it’s a good example of how an architect can vary the incidentals of the usual Pittsburgh Foursquare to produce a pleasing design. The dormer has been altered a bit, but its distinctive central arch remains, though it has been filled with a rectangular stock window.
This old bowling alley has some interesting history. It was built in 1929 with two floors of duckpin bowling. After conversion to ten-pin bowling, it petered out in the 1990s, but not before it had been used as a location in the movie Kingpin, starring Woody Harrelson. Father Pitt has not seen that movie, but according to Wikipedia it has a reputation as somewhere between bad and mediocre, and it was number 2 on someone’s list of Woody Harrelson’s best films.
The building itself is interesting. Though the ground floor has been altered, the second floor, with its arcaded balcony, is eye-catching and makes a strong impression on the streetscape of Brownsville Road.
An interesting building, published in this issue, built after the style of the early English Parish Church, and executed in that character exceptionally well both interior and exterior.
The exterior of the Church is of Rubble Masonry which as a material blends well with the immediate surroundings, the site being on Brownsville Road, Carrick, and of a rural atmosphere. The interior (as the interior of the early English Parish Church) is carried out in a very simple but dignified design, of plaster and timber, finished in a warm color scheme.
The Church has a seating capacity of 500, the Sunday School accommodating 450.
The architect, as the page with the photograph above tells us, was George H. Schwan. Although the immediate surroundings were “of a rural atmosphere” in 1915, they would not remain that way for long. Already in the photograph above you can see the great engine of urbanization: streetcar tracks.
The front of this building, which was originally constructed a little before 1910, has been perfectly pickled in the middle twentieth century. It is now an antique store advertising “useful junk,” and if you enlarge the picture, you will see how much of that junk is a perfect match for the era of the storefront itself.
Here is a building that probably dates from the 1890s, and it appears to be occupied by the business that built it. Miller Hardware has expanded into the building next door as well, but it is still an old-fashioned hardware store.
Sometimes old Pa Pitt hasn’t got around to publishing a picture of something before it disappears. Back in January he took this picture of a three-storey commercial building from 1901; it has just been demolished. It was not an extraordinarily fine work of architecture, but the upper floors were pleasingly proportioned and treated with enough ornamentation to make the building a good citizen of the streetscape. The ground floor was a mass of decades’ worth of improvised improvements and adaptations; its last tenant was a general store that advertised “videos” among its wares, which tells us how long that store had been vacant.
