Two fine commercial buildings on Liberty Avenue. The large windows on the second, third, and fourth floors of No. 903 suggest workshops, which generally had the largest possible windows to take advantage of natural light.
Every once in a while old Pa Pitt slips in a picture taken with a cheap phone. This is one of them; he mentions it to point out that, within their limitations (this one demands bright light for acceptably sharp pictures), even cheap phone cameras can produce good pictures. The camera you have with you is always better than the one in the camera bag at home.
A pair of nicely restored buildings in what was once the commercial heart of Polish Hill. Note that the basement of one is on the same level as the storefront in the building next to it.
This view of the west side of Broadway in Beechview shows us a very Pittsburghish commercial district. The architecture is miscellaneous, including apartment buildings, commercial buildings, houses with storefront extensions, and tiny one-storey gap-filler storefronts. The street curves, so the buildings are not all perfectly rectangular. And of course this is Pittsburgh, so the whole row is on what in other cities would be called a steep slope, though in Pittsburgh we expect the Red Line streetcars to negotiate it.
Beechview is something unique in Pittsburgh and very rare in the United States: an early-twentieth-century streetcar suburb where the streetcars still run down the main street as they did when the neighborhood was first laid out. The central business district has had its ups and downs; right now it is a good place to find interesting little ethnic restaurants and groceries. Most of the neighborhood is laid out as a grid in spite of the precipitous hills, but Broadway, the street with the car line, follows the top of the ridge. Beechview Avenue (below) continues the straight line of the business district as Broadway curves off toward the Fallowfield streetcar viaduct and abruptly ends at Fallowfield Avenue, leaving the streetcars to continue on their own right-of-way.
Following the ancient tradition that the street with the tracks belongs to the streetcar company, the Port Authority is responsible for maintaining Broadway.
Streetcar service in Beechview is interrupted right now because the Saw Mill Run viaduct has been closed for emergency repairs. The Red Line will roll up Broadway again as soon as the bridge reopens.
This building sits in what may be the densest block of great architecture in North America, and no one pays attention to it. It is not mentioned in the various guides to Fourth Avenue, so old Pa Pitt does not know the architect or whether the building even has a name. When the building was put up, it was apparently at 93 and 95, according to the numbers over the doors; but its address is now 311 Fourth Avenue. A classified ad in the Dispatch from 1890 mentions the firm of Black & Baird as lending money at 95 Fourth Avenue. The National Real Estate Journal in 1922 shows 311 as the home of the Freehold Real Estate Co.; if the address numbers had changed by then, this is that building.
As a work of architecture, the only thing that can be said against it is that it does not compete with the works of Daniel Burnham, Alden & Harlow, Frederick Osterling, and the other great names whose works line this street. If it is a work of one of those masters, then it is a lesser work—but certainly not one to be ashamed of. In any other block it would be one of the more distinguished buildings. The large windows on the second and third floors suggest workshops of some kind. The ornamentation is artistic and in exactly the right proportion to accent rather than unbalance the architectural forms.
Any readers who know more about the origin and history of this building are earnestly invited to comment.
This building has had some adventures. Originally a typical Pittsburgh Romanesque commercial building, it had a radical renovation of the ground floor at some point in the Art Deco era (early enough that the entrances are still recessed from the sidewalk). Possibly at the same time, but probably later, the second and third floors were very inexpertly done over in an aggressively modernist style: the ornaments removed, the original tall windows replaced with much smaller windows, and the remaining space bricked up. Only the top remains more or less unaltered, though its ironwork date could use a bit of restoration, and the ironwork initials have left only their shadows.
A commercial building like a thousand others in the city, but nicely restored, with attractively varied brickwork and a subtle polychrome scheme to pick out the details of the trim. Because old Pa Pitt happened to be out for a walk in the neighborhood, we get to see it from all angles.
In most cities you can ask how many floors a building is and get a reasonable answer. In Pittsburgh, that’s a complicated question.
This was the home of a prosperous shopkeeper in East Birmingham, one who had two full floors of living quarters above the shop, with the addition of a couple of comfortable attic rooms. The ground floor has been altered somewhat, but only in the incidentals; on the whole, the building is in a splendid state of preservation.
Uptown Mount Lebanon has one of the best collections of Art Deco architecture in the area. These two buildings sit side by side on Washington Road at the corner of Alfred Street. With some confidence, old Pa Pitt identifies the Gothic fantasy on the right as an old movie theater, although he would be happy to be corrected.
Update: Father Pitt is corrected. The building on the right was the William Hall office and apartment building, designed in 1929 by Geisler & Smithyman. The one on the left was the Medical Arts Building, as we can guess from the splendid terra-cotta panels.
