Father Pitt

Tag: Mattern Avenue

  • Dormont Methodist Episcopal Church

    Dormont Methodist Episcopal Church

    Built in 1920 in an angular modern-Gothic style, this church served its original congregation until 2013, the year of the great collapse of Dormont mainline churches, when the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Baptists all threw in the towel. The building became a Buddhist temple for a while (the Buddhists gave it the current paint scheme), but it seems not to be active right now. It is, however, kept up well.

    Thanks to the Gazette Times of September 13, 1920, we have a picture of Bishop McConnell of the M. E. Church laying laying “a copy of the Gazette Times containing announcement of the corner stone laying, coins of the present day, a list of trustees and a list of members of the Dormont and Banksville churches, recently combined” in the cornerstone.

    Bishop McConnell laying documents in the cornerstone
    Cornerstone

    This cornerstone is a top contender for the coveted title of Most Awkward Word Break on a Stone Inscription Outside a Country Graveyard.

    Capsule Enclosed

    It seems that another capsule was laid in 2009, four years before the church dissolved.

    Dormont United Methodist Church

    None of the news stories we found mentioned an architect, but we hope to find a name eventually.

    Dormont Methodist Church
    Side entrance
    Tower
    Dormont Methodist Episcopal Church
    Dormont M. E. Church
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6; Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • Mattern Avenue, Dormont

    2943 Mattern Avenue

    Mattern Avenue is a short street that illustrates what Father Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development. In population density, Dormont is number 119 out of tens of thousands of municipalities in the United States, and it is the most densely populated municipality in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area—denser than Pittsburgh.1 Yet the streets do not feel crowded. Mattern Avenue has a mixture of large houses designed by prestigious architects, smaller single-family houses, duplexes, and an apartment building, so that a fairly large number of people are housed in a small area, but without piling them up into concrete warehouses. Instead, we get a pleasantly varied streetscape and a quiet residential street that feels roomy.

    The house above and below is by far the most original composition on the street. It seems as though the architect was told, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” So that was what the client got: a mad bungalow with some sort of growth disorder.

    2943
    Third-floor oriel
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