This flamboyantly eclectic building caught old Pa Pitt’s eye as he walked down Wood Street in Wilkinsburg. He knows nothing else about it, other than that he hopes current and future owners realize that they have a remarkable building in an unusually good state of preservation.
An unusually well-preserved commercial building in an eclectic style from the early twentieth century. The glass block in the stairwell doubtless marks where some more attractive art glass, which probably became a maintenance headache, would have been; and the blank panels above the storefronts were probably art glass as well (compare, for example, this other storefront on the same street). But the ground floor was never fussed with very much, and it still retains its stonework and inscription. The grey paint is not old Pa Pitt’s favorite treatment, but paint can be painted over.
The dense Highland Avenue business district in Shadyside spilled across the tracks from East Liberty in the 1920s. Before that, the area was a residential section that began to build up in the 1870s. And if you peer behind the storefronts, you can see that much of that residential section is still there behind a crust of commercial development. For example, the building above looks like a typical 1920s store-and-apartments building from the front, but from this angle we can see that it’s an addition to a large double house built in the Second Empire style in the 1870s.
This house had its ground floor turned into a store without extreme alterations to the rest of the building.
This Second Empire house, built in the 1880s, has a magnetic attraction for architectural debris.
The corner of West Liberty Avenue and Potomac Avenue is the center of the Dormont commercial district, and it is framed by two buildings that are very well suited for such a prominent location. The ground floor of the one above has been remodeled more than once, including what must have been an eye-catching moderne remodeling that left it with some rounded windows. The corner is marked with a turret, which is always good on a corner building. We suspect that the turret may have had a witch’s cap on top, but even without it the turret makes a good corner marker, accented with terra-cotta foliage around the top.
This building has a storefront with a proper corner entrance that has not been filled in, though the ground floor also appears to have been remodeled in the mid-twentieth-century moderne era.
Yesterday we looked at the Spanish Mission style in Dormont. One of the adjacent city neighborhoods, Brookline, is also stuffed with Spanish Mission commercial buildings along Brookline Boulevard. Again, we look for tiled overhangs (although often the tiles have been replaced with asphalt shingles) held up by exaggerated brackets.
This building was the Brookline Theatre, a silent-era neighborhood movie house.
The building above and the one below both bear dates of 1926, and they share some similar design ideas—though the one above has slated instead of tiled overhangs.
An abstract and geometric form of the style, but the overhang was probably tiled originally, and it probably had brackets before it was rebuilt.
A tiled overhang and exaggerated brackets to hold it up: these are two markers of the Spanish Mission style that was fantastically popular in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Dormont in particular filled up with apartment and commercial buildings in that style, like this one at Potomac and Glenmore Avenues, which was built in 1923. Here’s a small collection of commercial buildings in the Mission style on Potomac Avenue and West Liberty Avenue, the two main commercial streets of the borough.
It would have been a better composition with the original ground floor, but even so the upper two-thirds are attractive. We attribute this building to William E. Snaman because it is the only apartment building in the vicinity built at the right time to match this listing:
The Construction Record, October 30, 1915. “George E. McKee, Alger street, was awarded the contract for erecting a three-story brick store and apartment building on West Liberty avenue, Dormont, for Mrs. Mary Ivol, 6268 West Liberty avenue, Dormont. Plans by Architect W. E. Snaman, Empire building. Cost $10,000.”
About twenty years ago, there was an aborted attempt to revitalize the business district of Beechview—aborted because the developer absconded with the money and went back to his native Brazil, whence, according to the Brazilian constitution, he could not be extradited. So neighborhood gossip tells us, at any rate. The project had got as far as partly restoring this building, and a thriving restaurant occupied the ground floor for a while. But then the furnace broke, and the landlord was gone, and the building was tied up in legal wrangling and became uninhabitable. Meanwhile, much of the business district more or less revitalized itself, with a big Mexican supermarket and a number of interesting ethnic restaurants moving in.
Now, at last, the restoration is beginning again, and this time it seems very thorough. It’s an attractive building that deserves a long future. Old Pa Pitt hopes his readers will pardon these hasty cell-phone pictures, taken as he happened to be passing by without his usual big bag of cameras.
Although Father Pitt has no evidence other than the style and the location, he suspects the building was designed and built by local architect and contractor William J. Gray, who was responsible for the Boylan Building on the opposite corner of the same intersection and for a now-vanished building on one of the other corners—and quite possibly for the building on the fourth corner as well.
These arches framed inset balconies for the upstairs apartments. It looks as though they are to be filled in, which may be necessary to make the building rentable, but will take away a distinctive feature.
More of the Victorian business district of Bloomfield, from the age when it was a very German neighborhood. We begin with a building we have seen before, which has just finished a renovation and is ready for another century and a quarter of use. The tall third floor, as old Pa Pitt remarked before, looks like an assembly room of some sort.
The rest of these buildings all date from the 1890s.
The date stone gives us the date 1890 and the name of the owner, P. Biedenbach.
Two of a row of modest houses with storefronts put up in the 1890s.
A building that preserves its corner entrance, though not the original treatment of it.
Elaborate brickwork distinguishes this building from its neighbors.
Another small storefront with living quarters above.
This building is probably the work of Sylvanus W. McCluskey, a Lawrenceville architect. Our source spells the name “McCloskey,” but that is within the usual limits of Linotypist accuracy. From the Pittsburg Post, October 9, 1900:
Another apartment house is to be built in the Sixteenth Ward. It will stand on a plot at Nos. 4517 and 4519 Liberty street, Bloomfield, and will be owned by Michael McKenna. It will be a three-story brick building with storerooms on the first floor. Architect S. W. McCloskey designed it and has awarded the contract for its erection to Frank McMasters. Work on it will be started at once. The building without the interior finish will cost about $15,000.
