The glass front with a semicircular end was very popular in the era of streamlined midcentury modernity. This storefront, which has been vacant since Anthon’s moved out, preserves its moderne look almost perfectly, and we hope the next tenants will appreciate it.
Some readers doubtless find neglected buildings depressing. And they are, but they are also enlightening. Neglect may preserve details that would have been replaced if the owner had prospered; and here we have a house, originally with a storefront, that keeps its wooden siding and wood trim when other frame houses nearby have long been shrouded in aluminum.
Note the neatly kept new houses built just a few years ago right next door. Calbride is very much a mixed-bag sort of neighborhood, but the trend is upward.
Carson Street on the South Side has our best collection of Victorian commercial buildings. For the second place, several neighborhood spine streets are in the running. Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield is one; Butler Street in Lawrenceville is another. But for variety and quality of Victorian architecture, old Pa Pitt might award the second place to East Ohio Street in Dutchtown.
This little house with storefront is probably one of the earliest buildings on the street. Italianate details like the brackets place it in the middle nineteenth century, but otherwise it is not much different from the houses that grew up in Pittsburgh and Allegheny from the moment we had access to bricks.
The contrast with the high-Victorian building next door is striking. This building must have looked frightfully modern in 1888. The next generation of architects would find it old-fashioned, because they had gone back to a more pedantically correct classicism.
Potomac Avenue is a good example of the suburban neighborhood business district of the early twentieth century, and one of the pleasantest shopping streets in the South Hills. Here are just a few of the storefronts.
The Spanish Mission style was especially popular in Dormont. To make a building Spanish Mission style, you put a tiled overhang along the top of the façade. Done. This building, incidentally, is still home to the Potomac Bakery, which as of this writing has been here for 99 years.
There was a time, not too long ago, when almost every neighborhood business district had a Murphy’s variety store. This one is now a pool hall, but it has changed very little on the outside.
This is the building at the corner of West Liberty Avenue and Potomac Avenue; we have pictures of the West Liberty Avenue end as well. It is decorated with conventional but pretty terra-cotta panels.
This ornate building was put up in the 1880s for an obviously prosperous grocer named F. Beckert, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt can tell you about it. Whoever drew the Ohio Street façade had a great deal of fun tracing angular intersecting lines. In fact those lines may be more clever than we realize at first glance: they disguise the asymmetry of the front. The left bay is wider than the other two, but because of the complexity of the patterns in the ornamentation, we read the building as symmetrical.
Except for the new windows on the second floor, which look a bit staring but do at least seem to fit the holes they were made for, this building is unusually well preserved—a Victorian feast of ornaments of all types, applied lavishly but not without an eye for the overall effect.
The fact that the left half is a sort of narrower duplicate of the right half suggests that it was built as an addition when Mr. Hollander acquired the lot next door.
This fine example of provincial Rundbogenstil stands on Philadelphia Street, the main business street in the town of Indiana, and we have no need to ask when it went up, because the date 1910 is picked out in large numbers made of contrasting bricks.
Five years later, another White building went up a few doors up the street in a similar style:
This one had a higher budget: not only was it larger, but it also had stone trimmings and large art-glass windows (later replaced with glass block). Note the apparently original storefront on the right-hand side.
Old Pa Pitt doesn’t know how Mrs. White was related to Harry White. But that they were related is obvious, both from the matching styles and from this keystone on the Mrs. C. B. M. White building, which bears a monogram with the initials HW.
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.
