Father Pitt

Tag: Storefronts

  • Fancy Front in Allentown

    740 East Warrington Avenue
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    If you’re stuck in a dumpy old wooden building and your business is prospering, but not prospering that much, you can make a good impression by putting a new front on the building and leaving the rest. That’s what happened here. This is actually a wood-frame building—except on the street face, where the owner added a spiffy new brick and stone front. Old maps reveal the secret: a thin line of brick appears on the front of the wooden building between 1910 and 1923. Mission accomplished: the building looked new and expensive, but the owner wasn’t deep in debt.

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  • Second Empire Storefront on Warrington Avenue, Allentown

    804 East Warrington Avenue

    The Alla Famiglia restaurant was one of the pioneers in the ongoing revitalization of Allentown, and its owners have spiffed up this building beautifully. They have also expanded into the old movie theater next door.

    804 East Warrington Avenue
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • The Louisa, Carrick

    Louisa

    A typical small apartment building with storefronts that keeps many of its distinctive details, including the tiled overhang with exaggerated brackets. The windows have been replaced (although the art glass surrounding the stairwell windows is still there), and the storefront on the right has been heavily altered. But the quoins picked out in contrasting Kittanning brick still grab our attention as we walk by.

    Perspective view
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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  • Commercial Building on Wood Street, Wilkinsburg

    817–813 Wood Street
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    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.

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  • Hafer Building, Dormont

    Hafer Building

    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.

    Hafer Building
    Hafer and Kinsey Buildings
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Residential Relics on Highland Avenue, Shadyside

    244 South Highland Avenue

    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.

    232 South Highland Avenue

    This house had its ground floor turned into a store without extreme alterations to the rest of the building.

    Gable
    258 South Highland Avenue

    This Second Empire house, built in the 1880s, has a magnetic attraction for architectural debris.

    254 South Highland Avenue
    254 South Highland Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • The Center of Dormont

    2900 West Liberty Avenue

    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.

    Turret with terra-cotta foliage
    2890 West Liberty

    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.

    2890 West Liberty Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePx HS10.
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  • Spanish Mission Style on Brookline Boulevard

    802 Brookline Boulevard

    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.

    Brookline Theatre

    This building was the Brookline Theatre, a silent-era neighborhood movie house.

    Brookline Theatre
    758–800 Brookline Boulevard
    Windows and tiled overhang
    758–800
    936–932
    Slated overhangs

    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.

    Tiled overhangs
    972 Brookline Boulevard
    944
    944
    824
    Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    An abstract and geometric form of the style, but the overhang was probably tiled originally, and it probably had brackets before it was rebuilt.

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  • Spanish Mission Style in Dormont

    1431 Potomac Avenue

    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.

    1436–1434 Potomac Avenue
    1436–1434 Potomac Avenue
    Wasson Building
    Wasson Building
    1419–1421 Potomac Avenue
    2883 West Liberty Avenue
    2893 and 2895 West Liberty Avenue
    West Liberty Avenue
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Apartment Building with Storefronts by William E. Snaman in Dormont

    2895–2899 West Liberty Avenue

    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.”

    Wreath in stained glass
    Apartment building at Tennessee and West Liberty Avenues
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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