Arlington Avenue on March 30, 1968, with Route 48 streetcar coming out of the streetcar loop, by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Arlington Avenue was already looking a bit bedraggled in 1968, when David Wilson, a streetcar fanatic who documented the streetcar lines of Pittsburgh with hundreds of pictures, caught the Route 48 car peeking out of the streetcar loop.
Most of the buildings in this picture are still there on Arlington Avenue, but the Arlington business district has mostly been abandoned by business. The storefronts that are not empty have been filled in for apartments.
This one, with a much-altered ground floor, is still going as a convenience store. Because the street plan in Arlington is irregular, many of the commercial buildings on Arlington Avenue are odd shapes.
This little storefront has been filled in by a contractor who had no need of a busybody architect to tell him what to do. The original building is a pleasing little composition by someone who might have seen some of the German art magazines that circulated among architects in Pittsburgh.
A little of the Kittanning brick facing has come down from the front of this building, revealing the cheaper ordinary brick behind it.
A beautiful storefront with veiny marble and a large panel of stained glass spanning the whole width. Note the properly inset entrance, so that the door does not fly open into passing pedestrians’ faces—a requirement we have forgotten.
Chartiers Avenue is the main business street of downtown McKees Rocks; and although it has lost some important buildings, enough remains to form the basis of a revival that seems to be in its early stages already. Above, a typically Pittsburgh commercial interpretation of the Italian Renaissance.
This little building has an interesting combination of details. The upper windows have round arches, but the lintels above them are fattened into incipient Gothic arches. The multiple decorative patterns in the brick add a rug-like texture to the front.
This building is marked “HALL” on old maps, suggesting that it belonged to a lodge of some sort. It has been altered so much that it is hard to see what it originally looked like. Nevertheless, it presents a neat front, if not a well-proportioned one. The vast expanse of side wall, exposed when a more interesting neighboring building was demolished about ten years ago, cries out for a huge mural of Cubist guitars.
“Cute” is a word old Pa Pitt seldom employs, but it is hard to think of a better term for the Gothic front on this little building. It appears to be a later addition to an older building. The Gothic peak is a thin false front with nothing behind it, and it was made a little too insubstantial: it is leaning backward slightly and will probably have to be stabilized by the next owner.
The ground floor has been altered, but the original character of this corner building is otherwise well preserved. Until very recently, its neighbor was one of the finest buildings in McKees Rocks, the McKees Rocks Trust Company, a sumptuously Ionic bank that loomed paternally over the whole block. As you can see, Father Pitt was just a little too late.
Finally, this union hall is a fascinating example of contemporary architecture. The building was an undistinguished little storefront from the 1950s or so, altered so much that it was impossible to guess its original character. In 2016, however, this impressive classical front was put on, which changed the look not only of the building but even of the whole street around it. Father Pitt has seen many examples of “New Classical” architecture that make him want to hide under an Edwardian sofa, but this one does exactly what it set out to do. It has classical dignity and a little ostentatiousness without lapsing into parody. The exposed girder above the column is a wry wink at modernist architecture, but the metal canopy makes the girder seem appropriate.
In its prime, this Renaissance palace on Island Avenue had four storefronts on the ground floor and three floors of apartments above. The storefronts have also been turned into apartments, but in a cheap way that could probably be reversed when McKees Rocks is prosperous again. The building is still in pretty good shape, and the details are worth appreciating, for which reason we give you a very large picture above. Old Pa Pitt especially likes the round and oval windows in the stairwells.
Across the street is a smaller building whose storefronts have also been turned into apartments, but with even less alteration. The big display windows are still there. It’s easy to imagine the ground floor becoming trendy little shops again in that rosy future when Island Avenue is a busy commercial street once more.
Highland Avenue crosses Centre Avenue in East Liberty at an odd angle, creating an opportunity for two typically Pittsburghish odd-shaped buildings. First, the Wallace Building, shoved into a sharp corner and coming to a point at the intersection.
Old Pa Pitt hopes his readers will forgive a slightly imperfect composite of three photographs.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
On the opposite side of Centre Avenue, the Stevenson Building fills in an oblique angle. Its prominent corner entrance makes the most of its location.
There is some uncertainty about the design of this building. It is listed by the city as a building designed by William Ross Proctor and built in 1896. However, Father Pitt finds a 1927 listing in the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, that matches this building perfectly and assigns it to O. M. Topp: “313. Architect: O. M. Topp, Jenkins Arcade, Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: James B. Stevenson. Title: Store and Office Building. Location: Highland and Center Avenues. Approximate size: 25×100 ft.; three stories and basement. Cubage: 100,000 cu. ft. First story: Amherst buff sandstone; second and third stories: Roman brick and terra cotta.” Nevertheless, a building of exactly these dimensions stood here long before 1927, and we have not been able to find any newspaper stories about its destruction or replacement. It is possible that Topp only supervised renovations, and the editor of the Charette misunderstood the information he was given. As of now, therefore, Father Pitt assigns the building to O. M. Topp, but with the understanding that Proctor might have been the original architect.
Norwood is a traditionally Italian neighborhood in Stowe Township, originally a suburban development of modest detached houses connected to McKees Rocks and the Pittsburgh transit system by its own incline. The Norwood Incline closed in 1923, though a little shelter at the bottom station remains (see pictures of the Norwood Incline Shelter here). By that time, it was easy to get to the neighborhood by automobile or trolley.
The Norwood Honor Roll, above, no longer has its honor roll. Many neighborhoods had painted honor rolls, and it is possible that this one was painted. Or it is possible that a bronze plaque was stolen and sold to a scrap dealer, who, faithfully believing that people are fundamentally honest, never even suspected that the hunk of bronze with names all over it was stolen. Perhaps someone from the neighborhood can tell us the story. The painted dedication is an act of love from someone in the neighborhood.
Many of the buildings in what was the business district of Norwood are faced with Kittanning brick, but clad the rest of the way around with cheap ordinary brick.
Layers of history and cycles of prosperity and decline can be read in these two buildings. It looks as though a small business, owned by the residents of the house to the right, grew and prospered and faded and was finally replaced with apartments. The renovations to the building on the left suggest that there was probably plenty of money in the 1970s.
This tall and narrow building looks like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense—a bar with a few rooms upstairs.
This is a building you walk right past without even noticing it. One of old Pa Pitt’s favorite things to do is to show people how interesting the things they walk right past can be. This building was the subject of an article in the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, so we know quite a bit about it, including that it looked like this when it was just finished in 1952:
The architect was Vincent Schoeneman, known as “Shooey,” who had a flourishing practice in the middle of the twentieth century. He was “given carte blanche” on the design, the article tells us, but put some effort into making the building fit with its prewar neighbors. Thus the curious combination of modernist and Colonial elements.
Some things have changed. The windows have been replaced, trading the twelve horizontal panes on each side for three vertical sheets of glass, which is not an improvement. The signboard that once displayed the address in letters that managed to be both modest and large has been covered with aluminum (with a dark stripe that would be perfect for the words “633 WASHINGTON ROAD” spelled out in white letters). The wooden planters are no longer there, but they have been replaced by stone benches or shelves that match the side walls. The Colonial doors have been replaced with more ordinary stock doors. Still, a good bit of the original detail remains.
This building on Beechview Avenue is good training in urban archaeology. We can see the changes it has gone through and guess at what it might have looked like when it was new.
We notice, for example, that the windows on the third floor are rectangular, but the holes for them are arched. Likewise, the windows on the second floor are too small for their holes. Luckily the window-replacement project was done without serious alterations to the underlying wall, so it will be possible for a prosperous future owner to install windows that fit the holes.
We can also see that the ground floor was originally a storefront. It has been turned into another apartment, as often happens in neighborhoods where the commercial district has shrunk.
What are we to make of those wood shingles that hang over the first floor? They probably were installed in the 1970s, when such things were popular; they would have served the two purposes of covering the original signboard above the store and giving both entrances of the building a bit of key-fumbling shelter.
Western Avenue in Allegheny West is an eclectic mix of buildings, from grand mansions to humble rowhouses to Art Deco storefronts. Here are some of the buildings on the southern side of the street, photographed late in the day when the sun was glancing across them.
This house, now the Parador Inn, was one of the fine houses put back in top shape by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson. It has a detailed history at the Allegheny West site.
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