The Stanley was designed as a silent-movie palace, but opened in 1928, just as talkies were making a revolution in the movie business. The architects were the Hoffman-Henon Company of Philadelphia. It was the biggest theater in Pittsburgh when it opened, and as the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts it is still our biggest theater now.
The skyscraper behind the theater is the Clark Building, which was built at the same time and designed by the same architects as part of the same development package.
This building shows up as a theater on a 1916 map, and that is all Father Pitt knows about it.
The intersection of Brownsville Road and Narrow Avenue (now Newett Street) in 1916.
It is not documented at Cinema Treasures, where theater fanatics have catalogued 178 theaters in Pittsburgh, or at the expiring and impossible-to-navigate Carrick-Overbrook Wiki, so it may not have lasted very long as a theater. (And Father Pitt is only making the assumption that it was a movie theater rather than a live theater or vaudeville house, because the latter seems much less likely for the era and place.) If anyone from the neighborhood knows the story of this building, the information will be received with gratitude. The building is well kept: it has been updated just enough to be useful to its current tenant without destroying the original design of the exterior.
A quarter-century ago, the O’Reilly opened with a brand-new play by August Wilson (King Hedley II). That makes it a newcomer by Penn Avenue standards. But Penn Avenue has been the heart of the theater district for a century and a half, and the O’Reilly stands on the exact site of Library Hall, whose auditorium was used as the Bijou, Victorian Pittsburgh’s most prestigious theater, where touring stars like Dion Boucicault played. The site had been a parking lot for more than sixty years before the O’Reilly was built, but we can think of this theater as continuing the Bijou tradition.
The building was designed by Michael Graves, the postmodernist whose brand of neoneoclassicism was influential in the movement. Mr. Graves also designed Theater Square next door, which houses the Greer Cabaret and a well-dressed parking garage.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
Old Pa Pitt has been dumping quite a load of pictures in these pages for the past few days. He realized that the pictures have been backing up and decided he ought to try to catch up with them. But how backed up were they? Here is a picture of the O’Reilly taken with a Kodak Signet 40 in June of 2000, when the building was only six months old. Father Pitt has never published it here before.
The Brookline Theatre on Brookline Boulevard in Brookline was a typical neighborhood movie house of the silent era. According to Ed Blank, the well-known newspaper critic, who has made a thorough study of Pittsburgh movie houses, it opened on March 28, 1921. It ceased to show movies about half a century ago, and since then has had a varied career as a thrift shop, a bar, and currently a sports bar with two competing cell-phone dealers. The Mission style of the building, with its tiled overhang and exaggerated wooden brackets, was popular in the 1920s, especially in the South Hills neighborhoods.
This is the most important remaining work of Louis Bellinger, who for his entire career was the only Black architect in Western Pennsylvania. It was built as the Pythian Temple, an exceptionally grand lodge house. It opened in 1928; but after less than ten years it was sold and became a movie theater, the New Granada, with the ground floor redesigned in streamlined Art Deco by Marks & Kann. Both as a lodge and as a theater it was one of the great jazz venues of all time, and the roster of stars who performed here is long and dazzling—Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and our own Lena Horne, just to name four.
After half a century of vacancy and multiple schemes for restoration, the New Granada is finally getting the love it deserves. It will have performance spaces and offices, and the whole block has been redeveloped with colorful new apartments and restored older buildings.
Except for the ground floor, the building still stands very much as Bellinger designed it. Shields and helmets in terra cotta remind us of the building’s Knights of Pythias origins.
In seventeen and a half years of writing about Pittsburgh, few things have made old Pa Pitt happier than seeing the progress on this building. It will stand for years as a tribute to a neglected architect, to the history of the Hill, and to the great legacy of jazz in Pittsburgh.
Charles Geisler, who lived in the South Hills neighborhoods all his working life, was a successful architect who specialized in small to medium-sized apartment and commercial buildings. Much of his work had a tint of the Spanish Mission style. The ground floor of this building, put up in 1923, has probably changed, but the upper floors are unusually well preserved, with tiled overhang, nine-over-one windows, and carved wood brackets, making this an excellent example of Geisleriana.
This little building looks like the little brother of the building next door. Father Pitt has no direct evidence that Geisler designed it, but the two properties were under the same ownership in 1923. Given the notable similarity in the treatments of the rooflines, it is reasonable to suspect Geisler, even if we cannot yet convict him of the design.
The Rex is attributed to Geisler in city architectural surveys, although it has been remodeled more than once, and old Pa Pitt would not be surprised if one of those remodelings was under the direction of Victor A. Rigaumont, who had a prosperous practice converting the silent generation’s movie houses to up-to-date Art Deco palaces for the talkie era.
Built in 1914, the Garden was designed by Thomas Scott, who was responsible for a large number of buildings on the North Side and lived within walking distance of this one. Its last years as a theater were a bit disreputable, but it was spared the drastic exterior changes most other theaters suffered. It is now on its way to a new life as an apartment building; and, while we wish it might have been made a reputable theater again, at least the splendid terra-cotta front will be preserved.
The Manor, which opened in 1922, was designed by Harry S. Bair, who did a number of theaters around here (including the Regent, now the Kelly-Strayhorn in East Liberty). As the caption says, it was “a distinct departure from the conventional,” and the Tudor half-timbering of the exterior advertised the sumptuous club-like atmosphere of the interior. Today the exterior has been simplified, and the building expanded, but it still feels like an outpost of Merrie England on Murray Avenue.
This gable on the Darlington Road side of the building still preserves all its intricate diagonal brickwork and half-timbering.
These little chimneys should have their own separate landmark status.
Almost nothing remains of the original interior, though the Manor is still a movie house, now divided into four small theaters. Originally, the lobby was a feast of luxurious furniture and decoration.
And that was just the entrance lobby. If you were meeting someone or just waiting for something, you could retire to the parlor:
There was also a men’s club room with the atmosphere of an old English manor:
After all that, movies seem almost superfluous, but the auditorium was just as luxurious as the rest of the building:
Old Pa Pitt particularly likes the arrangement of tropical plants in the orchestra pit.
Today, although the Manor is still a very pleasant place to take in a movie, almost nothing is left of that sumptuous interior except a bit of ceiling and this fine chandelier:
The 1922 pictures all came from a two-page feature in Moving Picture World for August 5, 1922, and we reprint the text of the article here (making a few silent typographic corrections).
The Carnegie Lecture Hall is designed to put a large number of people close enough to hear a single lecturer. It was filled to capacity today with people who came to hear poetry, which makes the literate think good thoughts about Pittsburgh. The International Poetry Forum is back after fifteen years of silence, and the first poet to speak was its founder, Samuel Hazo, who at 96 years old seems to be aging backwards.
According to its page at Cinema Treasures, this theater opened as the Braverman in 1928, just at the beginning of the sound era, but was soon renamed the Boulevard Theatre. We can see multiple layers of renovations, the most significant of which happened in 1937, when it was given the Victor Rigaumont treatment. Mr. Rigaumont was Pittsburgh’s most prolific architect of neighborhood movie palaces, and indeed his works can still be found all over the Northeast. Here the Art Deco panels on the second floor are certainly his work. The later ground-floor treatment was beamed in from the parallel universe where Spock wears a beard. After the theater closed, this was used as a Cedars of Lebanon hall for some years. Now it is a nightclub belonging to the Beechview-based Las Palmas empire, which also includes half a dozen Mexican groceries, a restaurant, and a radio station.
Old Pa Pitt apologizes for the poor pictures. The sun was behind the building, and he had gone out with nothing but a phone in his pocket, not expecting to take pictures; then a delay in his other business left him with nothing to do for half an hour on Brookline Boulevard, one of his favorite commercial streets in the city.
