Last week we saw this picture of the old Carrick Hotel, with the Carrick Municipal Building behind it. The Municipal Building is still there, converted to a storefront. What happened to the hotel?
It’s still there, too, under decades of accretion.
You would hardly recognize it, until you notice those distinctive dormers peering at you from behind the later overgrowth. This kind of development is typical in business districts that became prosperous but not too prosperous: prosperous enough for commercial frontage to be valuable, but not prosperous enough to make it worthwhile constructing larger buildings. Houses and other buildings grew storefronts in front, but the valuable original building remained behind the new construction. As the neighborhood aged, the commercial frontage became less valuable again, and it was adapted into offices or apartments.
This building shows up as a theater on a 1916 map, and that is all Father Pitt knows about it.
The intersection of Brownsville Road and Narrow Avenue (now Newett Street) in 1916.
It is not documented at Cinema Treasures, where theater fanatics have catalogued 178 theaters in Pittsburgh, or at the expiring and impossible-to-navigate Carrick-Overbrook Wiki, so it may not have lasted very long as a theater. (And Father Pitt is only making the assumption that it was a movie theater rather than a live theater or vaudeville house, because the latter seems much less likely for the era and place.) If anyone from the neighborhood knows the story of this building, the information will be received with gratitude. The building is well kept: it has been updated just enough to be useful to its current tenant without destroying the original design of the exterior.
Carrick became a borough in 1904, and for this little all-in-one borough building hired the big-deal architect Edward Stotz.1 It must have created an impression of prosperity when it was built in 1905, and it still looks solid and respectable today, one year short of a century after the people of Carrick voted for the borough to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh in 1926. It has been converted into a retail store, and the huge second-floor window makes an excellent display for the current tenant.
The building originally had an elaborate baroque crest that has been shorn off. We can see it in this picture, where the municipal building appears behind the Carrick Hotel:
The Carrick business district is oddly discontinuous, with several clots of commercial buildings along Brownsville Road interspersed with less densely developed areas. Here are a few buildings in the clot near the intersection with Churchview Avenue. Above, an interesting building that looks more Chicago than Pittsburgh, with some modernistic Prairie Style details and charming little round-topped dormers with oval windows that will probably cost a fortune if they ever have to be replaced. For some reason someone decided to paint the blond Kittanning brick of the front grey, which was not an ideal choice but might have been the simplest way to get rid of graffiti.
This is a building in a style we might call Provincial Renaissance. The ground floor has been remodeled, probably more than once, and while it is not a good match for the rest of the building, old Pa Pitt will admit to a sneaking admiration for the impressive glass-block bay in the front.
Here is a building that had the typical Pittsburgh problem of a three-dimensional triangle to solve, where the architect had to deal with not only an awkward angle but also a steep rise behind the building. Whoever it was solved the problem attractively.
This building preserves much of its original detail, including the date 1904 in the crest. The ground floor, uglified by siding going in random directions, would look much better painted green to match the cornice and crest; but at least it is well maintained.
Finally, this building had an expensive and tasteless modernization applied about five years ago, replacing an earlier expensive and tasteless modernization that probably dated from the 1950s and had not aged well. The terra cotta around the entrance to the second floor hints at what the ground floor might have looked like originally.
It is never pleasant, but old Pa Pitt feels as though he has a duty to document things that might be gone soon. Sometimes miracles happen, and we can always hope, but without a miracle we can only turn to the photographs to remember what has vanished.
“Berg Place,” a group of three apartment buildings along Brownsville Road in Carrick, probably cannot be saved. It’s a pity, because the buildings, in a pleasant Arts-and-Crafts style flavored with German Art Nouveau, have a commanding position along the street, and their absence will be felt. They were abandoned a few years ago, probably declared unsafe, and since then they have rotted quickly.
Some of the simple but effective Art Nouveau decorations in brick and stone.
These two buildings across the street from Berg Place, damaged by a fire, may possibly still be saved. At present one of them is condemned, but that is not a death sentence, and it looks as though prompt action was taken to secure the one on the corner after the fire. They are typical of the Mission-style commercial buildings that were popular in Carrick and other South Hills neighborhoods, and they ought to be preserved if at all possible. Carrick is not a prosperous neighborhood, but much of the commercial district is still lively, and with the increase in city property values the repairs might be a good investment.
The congregation dissolved in 2020, so here is an excellent opportunity for an investment in a beautiful building in a trendifying neighborhood. It is in very good shape, and it has enough architectural distinctiveness to make its new owner proud. It also commands a prominent corner on Brownsville Road.
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.
