On an otherwise commercialized section of Centre Avenue, this little U-shaped terrace of rowhouses is almost invisible. As in Dover Gables, the fronts are arranged around a vehicle-free garden court.
Comments
-
Centre Villa Court, Friendship
-
Zion Evangelical Church, Bloomfield
If you are looking for a distinguished church building, here is one for sale, and in very good shape. It was built in 1906 as Zion Evangelical Church; the architect was Chauncey W. Hodgdon.1 For many years it was the Albright Methodist Church.
The building had more than one narrow escape from death. It was owned by the Methodists who also had the cathedral-sized First United Methodist Church right next to it; since this church was redundant, they proposed to sell it to a developer who would demolish it and build something profitable. When a city historic designation made that more difficult, the church sat abandoned and decaying for several more years, exchanging the fast death of redevelopment for the slow death of neglect. But about three years ago it was restored, including cleaning off the decades of accumulated soot.
This was the tower when old Pa Pitt passed by in 2008; he published this picture under the heading “The Vanishing Black Stones of Pittsburgh.” We may add this building to the list of previously black buildings whose blackness has vanished.
Or at least mostly vanished.
In the background we can see the massive lantern of First Methodist.
Canon PowerShotSX20 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens. - According to a city architectural survey from a few years ago. “This now-closed church has been for sale for several years now in an area where development pressures are significant. There was a fight in 2016 over possible city designation as historic, which was granted. The register had the address as 5445 Centre Ave. but the legal address is 486 S. Graham St.” ↩︎
Comments -
Central District & Printing Telegraph Company Building, East Liberty
This was the first telephone exchange for East Liberty: it was already here by the time the 1890 Hopkins plat map was compiled. It was built for the Central District & Printing Telegraph Company, which was soon absorbed into the Bell system.
The building has lost a cornice or crest in the front, but otherwise is well preserved.
The style is what old Pa Pitt likes to call Rundbogenstil, because Rundbogenstil is fun to say: it combines classical details, like the arches from the Baths of Caracalla in the third-floor windows, with decidedly unclassical decorative details in terra cotta and stone.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
Comments -
Knott Manor, Hill District
Joseph Hoover’s firm designed this modernistic apartment house, which was planned in 1950. It was named for Dr. Paul A. Knott, a medical doctor on the Hill who went into the landlording business. Except for the windows of one apartment, which were recently replaced, the building still stands very much as the architect designed it.
“Signatures Make Building Reality,” New Pittsburgh Courier, September 2, 1950, p. 6. Note in the drawing how much the architect was relying on the grid patterns of the windows for the effect of the front. That is precisely the detail that vanishes when those windows are replaced. “God is in the details,” as Mr. Mies said, and that is especially true of a modernist building like this, where the details are few and therefore chosen with care.
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
Comments -
Return of the New Granada
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.
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR. We also have pictures of the Pythian Temple from last year, in the middle of the restoration work.
Comments -
Centre Avenue YMCA, Hill District
These pictures are more than a year old, but old Pa Pitt just ran across them and realized they had never been published. It’s an important building with its own entry in the National Register of Historic Places, so Father Pitt’s only excuse is that the piles of pictures sometimes accumulate too fast for him to process.
Edward B. Lee was the architect of this YMCA, built in 1922–1923 for the “colored” population of the Hill District. The idea of separating races of human beings gives old Pa Pitt hives, and he wishes it had been repudiated more thoroughly than it has been. But if it was separate, we must at least give it credit for being equal. Few neighborhoods could boast a YMCA better than this one.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
Comments -
New Granada Apartments, Hill District
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.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
Comments -
Lutz’s Meat Market, Hill District
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.
Nikon COOLPIX P100. These corner entrances are often filled in, so it makes old Pa Pitt happy to see this one preserved and carefully restored.
Comments -
Pythian Temple, Hill District
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.
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.
Comments -
Adding a Third Floor to the Painter-Dunn Company, Shadyside
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.
Comments
