Allegheny West never quite became a slum, but it was down on its luck for a while. Over the past few decades it has very gradually turned into an expensive and trendy neighborhood, and the Western Avenue business district is lively and full of interesting one-off restaurants and shops. In a short stroll, we see some of the variety of commercial and domestic buildings that line one side of the street.
Larimer, like Bloomfield, was a German neighborhood that turned into an Italian neighborhood. The German residents mostly left as the Italian residents moved in; then, later, the Italian residents mostly left as the Black residents moved in. “White flight” is the usual term for the latter migration; Father Pitt has coined the term “Nordic flight” to describe the earlier evacuation of Northern European residents as “undesirable” Southern and Eastern Europeans moved in. If we look at a 1923 plat map of a block near this building, the names tell the story: Giordano, Romano, Bastone, Labriola, Ross, Boccella, Giaccia, Ferrara, Costa, Neff, Junker, Barni, Dettrich, Terenzio… Mostly Italian, with a few German stragglers; and it would not be surprising to find that those houses were being rented by Italian families.
This one Italian business remained in Larimer until just a few years ago. It had a convenient location at the end of the Larimer Avenue bridge, and as a restaurant supplier it did not depend on the walk-in trade, so there was no reason to move. Like many another shop in down-on-their-luck neighborhoods, it simply locked its door one day and pickled the shop as a gradually fading time capsule.
It’s rare to find something like this: an entire block of shops and apartments built all at once, and still active as shops and apartments. It’s the pre-automobile equivalent of a strip mall. Some alterations have happened over the century and a quarter or so of this row’s life, but many of the characteristic details are well preserved.
Designed by Alden & Harlow and built in 1908, this deliberately quaint little store has held up well.
Father Pitt does not know the story of this building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and McMasters Way. The great G. C. Murphy downtown empire, “the world’s largest variety store,” slopped into it as it expanded, and by bad luck and misunderstanding the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque for the main Art Deco Murphy’s building (designed by Harold E. Crosby in 1930) ended up on the front of this building instead. Whatever this building was originally, it’s obviously much older than 1930. Updates to the ground floor have been handled with good taste, and the entrance is still on the corner. Old Pa Pitt approves of corner entrances.
The ground-floor storefront was replaced at some time in the modernist era, but the upper two floors preserve two-thirds of a fine terra-cotta front.
Here is a remnant of the old middle-nineteenth-century commercial Pittsburgh, when a large part of the population lived downtown and shopkeepers often lived above their shops. In addition to being an unusual relic of the mostly obliterated past of downtown, this particular building is famous for its mural, “The Two Andys,” by Tom Mosser and Sarah Zeffiro.
Father Pitt was looking at Wikipedia’s list of flatiron buildings in the United States and thinking that he could multiply the number by ten or so just from buildings in Pittsburgh and the surrounding suburbs. So he has begun a collection of these flatiron buildings, meaning buildings that are triangular like a clothes iron. Here is one that he found especially attractive. The shape is dictated by the acute angle between California Avenue and Woodland Avenue, and of course it has the usual Pittsburgh problem of irregularity in three dimensions to deal with. The form of the building is typical of early-twentieth-century commercial architecture, but the Art Nouveau patterns picked out in light Kittanning brick set this building apart from others like it.
A typical Pittsburgh corner building—typical especially in that the corner is not a right angle. Some of the details are well preserved, including the elaborate decorative brickwork in the cornice and the signboard above the storefront, ready for some local artist to inscribe the next tenant’s name in paint.
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.
