Pittsburgh neighborhoods used to be full of little corner groceries. Most disappeared when big chain supermarkets took over the grocery trade. But occasionally a neighborhood store succeeds; this one in Beechview moved into a storefront that was vacant for some time and seems to be making a go of it.
Of course it used to be that your average corner grocery was only four or five steps from a streetcar line. That is no longer true in most places, but it is still true in Beechview.
Carson Street is famous for its Victorian commercial buildings, but here and there among the Victorian masterpieces, and the later fillers, are a few that we might call pre-Victorian. Even though they were built during the long reign of Queen Victoria across the sea, these buildings betray little of the style that we think of as Victorian. They are hardly architecture at all. They are built in the simple vernacular style that was current for decades in the early and middle nineteenth century—and had indeed been inherited from the eighteenth. They are identical to houses of the same era, except with the front of the first floor modified into a storefront.
Here are two of them. Both of them have been through various alterations over the years, but they are easily recognized by their peaked roofs with narrow projecting dormers, making them look almost like a child’s drawing of a house. From our 1872 map, it seems fairly certain that both of them were here in 1872, when East Birmingham was taken into the city of Pittsburgh; they probably date from the period of rapid development in East Birmingham during and right after the Civil War.
The Maul Building, built in 1910, was designed by the William G. Wilkins Company, the same architects who did the Frick & Lindsay building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). Both buildings are faced with terra cotta, and both lost their cornices—the one on the Andy Warhol Museum has been carefully reconstructed from pictures, but the one here is just missing. The rest of the decorations, though, are still splendid.
Some architectural historians say that about Carson Street on the South Side, and it certainly has a lot of distinguished Victorian commercial architecture. Here’s an album from a stroll down Carson Street on a rainy evening.
The district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street is commonly called Penn Main; it’s on the border of Lawrenceville and Bloomfield, and functions as a secondary commercial spine for both neighborhoods. Because the streets do not meet at a right angle, the buildings on the corner are various odd Pittsburgh shapes. This attractive commercial building is an irregular pentagon. Wilson Drugs, one of the diminishing number of independent neighborhood drug stores in the city, seems frozen in 1948, in spite of its electronic displays.
A splendid Victorian commercial building from 1881. The huge windows suggest showrooms or possibly workshops; the northwestern exposure would have given those rooms bright even lighting all day. Next door is the Baum Building, built as the Liberty Theater.
Addendum: This is the B. F. Jones Building, designed by Joseph Stillburg, according to Inga Gudmundsson McGuire, the world’s leading expert on Stillburg.
Here is the Crawford Grill three years before it closed, from a picture Father Pitt took in 2000 with a cheap but capable Russian camera called a Lomo Smena 8M. This was the second Crawford Grill, which opened in 1943; the first, which stayed open for a few years after the second opened, had been in the long-since-demolished part of Wylie Avenue on the Lower Hill.
The Crawford Grill was legendary in its time, and it is still a legend among jazz lovers today. It was the last holdout from a whole street of jazz clubs that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century.
Note, by the way, the name at the top of the façade—“Sochatoff Building.” The Hill was a glorious mix of ethnic groups, a place where all races and languages came together and had a good time—Greek and African and Lebanese and Russian and Jewish and German and Chinese.
Of course, the word used by the Powers That Be for that kind of neighborhood was “slum,” and it was the mission of good government to eliminate slums.
It would be oversimplifying things to say that the Hill collapsed because the authorities hated the idea of a place where different races came together in harmony. But it would not be false. There were other forces involved, but that was the biggest one. The destruction of the Hill was deliberate policy, proudly announced and boastfully acknowledged. Slums must be cleared. And the residents? Well, they’d just better not go off and make another slum somewhere else, because we’ll be watching. How can you tell whether a good neighborhood is turning into a slum? Well, if you see races mixing, that’s an infallible sign. Much public policy in the middle twentieth century was determined by the desirability of keeping races separate.
The Crawford Grill thumbed its nose at that segregation. People of all races and classes gathered there because the music was first-rate, and the food wasn’t bad either. The entire Lower Hill, including the original Crawford Grill, was destroyed to create an arid modernist wasteland, but the new Crawford Grill stayed open. Cut off from downtown and with much of its original heart ripped out, the Hill withered and the other jazz clubs faded, but the Crawford Grill stayed open. The 1968 riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated destroyed much of what was left of the business district, but the Crawford Grill stayed open. Even after the rest of the Hill had reached its lowest point, the Crawford Grill remained.
It finally closed in 2003, not from lack of business, but because the building required major repairs that were beyond what seemed reasonable to spend. In fact the club was successful enough that it moved to Station Square—but it lasted only three years there. The Freighthouse Shops part of Station Square was also in decline, though perhaps no one recognized it yet, and the traffic could not support the new club’s considerably higher expenses.
The building still stands today, isolated and forlorn. That splendid Victorian house to its left is gone now, replaced by a vacant lot. A group of neighborhood preservationists bought the building years ago, but no one has been able to do anything with it. It just sits there, with a state historical marker in front of it to remind us that it was something great once upon a time.
If old Pa Pitt were writing a short story for a literary magazine, he would end it by telling you that, late at night, neighbors still hear the wail of a saxophone from somewhere in the heart of the building. That would be the proper ending for the story. As it is, he has only the optimistic hope to offer that some day the neighborhood will come together and the doors will open and the jazz will flow again.
Built in 1884 in a Victorian Gothic style—Father Pitt calls it Commercial Gothic—this was a bank until 1943, according to the Lawrenceville expert Jim Wudarczyk. After that it was offices for quite a while, and then was refurbished as a restaurant and apartments above. This is not a great work of architecture, but the details are interesting and worth a close look. The builder reveled in his corner location and made that corner the focus of the whole building. Old Pa Pitt can’t help thinking that the treatment of the windows could have been improved by making it either more interesting or less interesting; the stone accents are either too much or too little.
There is almost nothing distinctive about this building, but Father Pitt would be very sorry to lose it. It is a very good example of a simple commercial building of the early twentieth century. The subtle decorative details are tasteful without ostentation. The ghost sign preserves some of the building’s commercial history. The ground floor has been unsympathetically altered, but the alterations are superficial and could be reverted without too much expense.
An unusually simple cast-iron front adorns this five-storey commercial building, which is actually the tallest thing on its block of Market Street. It is possible that the building has lost a cornice, but otherwise it probably looks not much different from the way it looked when it was first put up around 1900 or so.
