Father Pitt

Tag: Kittanning Brick

A Walk on Arlington Avenue in Arlington

Arlington Avenue is the business spine of the Arlington neighborhood, although not much business is left. Still, things are picking up, and there are more businesses now than there were a couple of years ago. The buildings on the street share certain similarities in style, but the thing a visitor will notice first is that very few of them are rectangles. Most of them are parallelograms or trapezoids. In these pictures, when you see buildings where the walls do not seem to meet at right angles, that is not because of distorted perspective from a wide-angle or telephoto lens. It is because the walls do not meet at right angles, as we see in this building, with an acute angle on the corner. Note also the cheaper red brick on the side wall, with the expensive Kittanning brick used only on the front.

Arlington Avenue is also a gourmet feast for lovers of utility cables.

The building above is the only one of the storefronts for which old Pa Pitt has an architect’s name: Edward Goldbach, who lived just down the hill from the building. It is quite possible that we will eventually find Mr. Goldbach’s name attached to several other buildings on the street: many of them share similar design principles and a similar taste for yellow Kittanning brick.

The little frame store at left is yet another skewed parallelogram.

These buildings are all skewed.

This Second Empire building was actually rectangular, but the modern storefront addition filled out the lot and made an acute angle.

These cellular masts probably make a large contribution to the economy of the Arlington Avenue business district. And here is our most artistic arrangement of utility cables yet.

This Second Empire building, on the other hand, took full advantage of the whole lot, leaving it with an obtuse angle at the corner.

These buildings are skewed in different ways, just to make sure the streetscape is never boring.

Nikon COOLPIX P100; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.

More pictures of Arlington Avenue.

December 21, 2024
A Stroll on Mill Street in Coraopolis
Kodak Pony 135 with Kentmere Pan 100 film (monobath developed).

The main business streets of Coraopolis are Fifth Avenue, Fourth Avenue, and Mill Street, a very narrow street that crosses the other two. (There is also a Main Street in Coraopolis, but, in Pittsburghish fashion, it is not the main street.) Let’s take a stroll down Mill Street together. We’ll take two cameras with us, one digital and the other loaded with black-and-white film.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

We’ll start at the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company building, a splendid bank designed by Press C. Dowler, who gave us a number of grand classical banks. Right across Fifth Avenue is…

…another grand classical bank, the Ohio Valley Trust Company. This one is still in use as a bank.

This plain but dignified doorway leads to the upstairs offices, which were a prestigious address for local businessmen. The architect W. E. Laughner had his office here.

Across the street is a substantial commercial block with a corner entrance.

Now we come to a building with tangled layers of history, but enough remains to show us the style of the original.

This bricked-in arch has a terra-cotta head for a keystone. Note that the original building was faced with Roman brick—the long, narrow bricks you see outside the arch—and not just Roman, but yellow Kittanning Roman brick.

This building next door used similar Kittanning Roman brick. The storefront has been altered, but long enough ago that it has an inset entrance to keep the door from hitting pedestrians in the face.

At the intersection with Fourth Avenue we meet the old Hotel Helm,¹ with its distinctive shingled turret. It probably bore a cap when it was built.

From here Mill Street leads past the train station and the Fingeret building, both of which we’ve seen before. At Second Avenue—as far as we’ll go for now—we come to…

…the Hotel Belvedere, which was probably a cheaper place to stay than the Hotel Helm. It still preserves its shingled gable, though the rest has been sheathed in three colors of fake siding.
1. Some of our information comes from 1924 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps at the Library of Congress. ↩︎
November 19, 2024
Arlington Avenue, 1968 and Today

Arlington Avenue on March 30, 1968, with Route 48 streetcar coming out of the streetcar loop, by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Arlington Avenue was already looking a bit bedraggled in 1968, when David Wilson, a streetcar fanatic who documented the streetcar lines of Pittsburgh with hundreds of pictures, caught the Route 48 car peeking out of the streetcar loop.

Most of the buildings in this picture are still there on Arlington Avenue, but the Arlington business district has mostly been abandoned by business. The storefronts that are not empty have been filled in for apartments.

This one, with a much-altered ground floor, is still going as a convenience store. Because the street plan in Arlington is irregular, many of the commercial buildings on Arlington Avenue are odd shapes.

This little storefront has been filled in by a contractor who had no need of a busybody architect to tell him what to do. The original building is a pleasing little composition by someone who might have seen some of the German art magazines that circulated among architects in Pittsburgh.

A little of the Kittanning brick facing has come down from the front of this building, revealing the cheaper ordinary brick behind it.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

Now, about that streetcar loop: we’ll be seeing that very soon, because it is still there as well, or at least partly so.

October 11, 2024
Kittanning Brick

A brick sidewalk in Allegheny West laid with grey Kittanning bricks. That is rare: most sidewalks in Pittsburgh were made with cheap red bricks. Kittanning bricks were special, generally used for facing buildings; in fact, we often see buildings with buff brick on the front, and cheaper red brick for the side and rear walls that no one is supposed to see.

In the East Coast cities, bricks are red. There are exceptions, mostly high-budget constructions: the Naval Academy in Annapolis, for example, makes extensive use of white brick. But it is striking to East Coasters when they come to Pittsburgh to see that bricks come in a multitude of colors. These are the famous Kittanning bricks, and the leading—though by no means the only—producer of them was the Kittanning Brick Company. They were used more extensively in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area than anywhere else, which is why a street of brick houses in Pittsburgh may be a rainbow of red, buff, grey, and white bricks.

In 1912, the Congressional Committee on Rivers and Harbors held hearings “On the Subject of the Improvement of Allegheny River, Pennsylvania, by the Construction of Additional Locks and Dams.” Mr. S. E. Martin, one of the titans of the brick industry in Kittanning, was invited to give testimony. Note, incidentally, that in the trade the plural of “brick” was “brick.”

Mr. PORTER. I now desire to introduce Mr. S. E. Martin, who represents some brickkilns along the Allegheny River, and the brick interests in general in what is known as the Kittanning district.

STATEMENT OF MR S. E. MARTIN, OF KITTANNING DISTRICT, PA.

Mr. MARTIN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, Mr. Porter informs me that the time is a little short, and I wish just simply to present to you an outline of the brick interests as they are represented in what we will term the Kittanning district.

In this district that will be affected by this proposed improvement there are eight or nine companies manufacturing brick between Templeton and White Rock. An estimate of their combined output is approximately 170,000,000 brick.

Now, this brick is not common brick, but face brick—brick that are used for facing buildings of all kinds. It makes an approximate tonnage of about 500,000 in the finished product. This brick, known as the Kittanning brick (which is a gray brick or a buff brick in different shades), can be manufactured only from the clay in this district. It has been proven that this clay does not exist outside of this immediate vicinity, and this clay has made a brick that has popularized itself all over the country.

The CHAIRMAN. What is the name of that brick?

Mr. MARTIN. Kittanning.

Mr. BARCHFELD. Is the Plaza Hotel in New York built of that brick?

Mr. MARTIN. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. You say it is the only clay in the world from which that brick can be made?

Mr. MARTIN. There is no clay that I know of that will manufacture the same brick.

May 7, 2024