The patchwork-quilt style of architecture has been popular in the last decade, but this is by far the most colorful implementation of it old Pa Pitt has seen. The whole block that includes the New Granada has been redeveloped, and these cheerful apartments, with ground-floor storefronts, make this section of the Hill seem lively and inviting again.
You can read the history of Lutz’s Meat Market at the Hill District Digital History site, where you’ll also see a picture by Teenie Harris, who, as usual, snapped the shutter at exactly the moment that captured everyone in the scene in the most characteristic pose.
The building has been beautifully restored, including the elaborate woodwork of the cornice and storefront.
These corner entrances are often filled in, so it makes old Pa Pitt happy to see this one preserved and carefully restored.
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.
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.
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.
This picture from The Builder, April, 1919, p. 28, shows the Painter Dunn Company building—identified as an Overland service station (it later moved up to Pierce-Arrow)—as it was built. The architects were the Hunting Davis Company, architects and engineers who specialized in industrial buildings. Later a third floor was added—probably supervised by the same architects, since it is as well integrated as it could be with the design of the original building, and Hunting Davis remained, through various exchanges of partners, one of Pittsburgh’s leading industrial architectural firms for decades.
The building is on Centre Avenue opposite Millvale Avenue, and after years of neglect it was beautifully refurbished for another century of use.
Edward Stotz was the architect of this auditorium, built in 1928. It was the centerpiece of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, which was founded by the Kaufmanns of Kaufmann’s department store to memorialize a daughter who died young; its purpose was to serve the poor immigrants of the Hill.
Highland Avenue crosses Centre Avenue in East Liberty at an odd angle, creating an opportunity for two typically Pittsburghish odd-shaped buildings. First, the Wallace Building, shoved into a sharp corner and coming to a point at the intersection. The building was designed by George S. Orth in 1896.1
Old Pa Pitt hopes his readers will forgive a slightly imperfect composite of three photographs.
On the opposite side of Centre Avenue, the Stevenson Building fills in an oblique angle. Its prominent corner entrance makes the most of its location.
The original building was designed by William Ross Proctor and built in 1896. In 1927, the three bays at far left in the picture above were added under the supervision of O. M. Topp, who matched the style of the original so carefully that Father Pitt had not noticed the seam, and therefore was confused about the architects in an earlier version of this article.2
A striking modernist Gothic church whose clean lines are lovingly preserved by the congregation. Below, we add some bonus utility cables to prove that this is Pittsburgh.
Elise Mercur was an extraordinary woman. The first female professional architect in Pittsburgh, and one of the first anywhere, she had a prosperous career for about a decade between 1894 and 1905. Then she retired, and most of her buildings have been crushed by the steamroller of time—or by university presidents who need them out of the way to make room for some donor’s vanity project.
This church remains, however. It was built for the St. Paul’s Episcopal congregation; later it passed to the Church of the Holy Cross, a Black Episcopal congregation that eventually moved to Homewood. Right now it belongs to the Christian Tabernacle Kodesh Church of Immanuel.
Those little triangular dormers are imitated from Richardson, who used them in his famous Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Allegheny West.
The Wikipedia article on Elise Mercur is unusually thorough, so old Pa Pitt will not repeat its information here. He will add, however, that he has been scanning old trade journals to see whether any other buildings by Mercur have survived, and he will publish any findings in this spot.
As the only known remaining work of our first female architect, this church has a historical significance that makes it a preservation priority. Father Pitt assigns it to the Near Threatened category in his classification of our vulnerable landmarks.
The most striking feature of St. Paul’s is the octagonal cupola.
The Warren United Methodist Church might qualify for Rundbogenstil were it not for the very slight pointing of the arches, which takes away the Rund part of Rundbogenstil. With its battlemented roofline, it gives the impression of a chapel built into a castle. The attached parsonage is more interesting and more striking than the church when we see it from the street, and our only legitimate complaint about it would be that it draws too much attention toward itself and away from the church.
Addendum: The architects of the church, and probably the parsonage as well, were Milligan & Miller of Wilkinsburg; it was built in about 1908. Source: Ohio Architect and Builder, July, 1907. “PITTSBURG.—Architects Milligan & Miller, of Wilkinsburg, are drawing plans for a brick and stone church to be erected on Center avenue, for the Warren Methodist Episcopal congregation. Cost $3,000.” A zero has probably been left out of the cost; you could not get a brick and stone church for $3,000, but this could easily be a $30,000 church.
So far this is the only building old Pa Pitt has identified as designed by J. E. Cole, about whom he knows nothing other than that Cole designed this building. The storefront has been modernized, but otherwise the building is in near-original condition. The corner is an obtuse angle, and Father Pitt wonders whether the unusual seam at that corner was the result of the architect’s original plan, or of the low-bidding contractor’s refusal to trim the bricks properly without an extra payment. It was imitated many years later by whoever added the modern storefront.
