A tiled overhang and exaggerated brackets to hold it up: these are two markers of the Spanish Mission style that was fantastically popular in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Dormont in particular filled up with apartment and commercial buildings in that style, like this one at Potomac and Glenmore Avenues, which was built in 1923. Here’s a small collection of commercial buildings in the Mission style on Potomac Avenue and West Liberty Avenue, the two main commercial streets of the borough.
It would have been a better composition with the original ground floor, but even so the upper two-thirds are attractive. We attribute this building to William E. Snaman because it is the only apartment building in the vicinity built at the right time to match this listing:
The Construction Record, October 30, 1915. “George E. McKee, Alger street, was awarded the contract for erecting a three-story brick store and apartment building on West Liberty avenue, Dormont, for Mrs. Mary Ivol, 6268 West Liberty avenue, Dormont. Plans by Architect W. E. Snaman, Empire building. Cost $10,000.”
This composite picture is very big if you enlarge it.
Old Pa Pitt’s unending mission is to help the people of Pittsburgh and surroundings see the things they pass right by without seeing. So here is a strip mall. You drive right past it without thinking that there could possibly be anything interesting about it, but this is in fact one of the pioneer strip malls in the Pittsburgh area. It was built in 1940 to a design by Thomas Benner Garman, a Mount Lebanon architect most of whose work was in traditional houses for the upper middle classes. When he designed commercial buildings, though, he adopted a decidedly modern style.
The key to his architectural ambidexterity was his sense of context. “Nature,” he said in 1956, “has a law that fits architecture—namely: Avoid the grotesque and unseemly.”1 What fits a street of suburban homes is not what fits a commercial thoroughfare.
The new Dormont Shops were promoted as a “drive-in one-stop shopping center,” a place where the suburban motorist would have the luxury of parking right out in front of the stores to do all the week’s shopping in one place. From the Pittsburgh Press, April 7, 1940:
The drive-in one-stop shopping center being erected on W. Liberty Ave., Dormont, is nearing completion.
The $250,000 building will be 250 feet long and 75 feet deep. It is set back about 80 feet from the street to provide parking space.
Frank H. Opferman, South Hills contractor, is the owner and builder. J. D. Marshall, real estate broker, is the exclusive rental agent. Thomas B. Garman was the architect.
Site of the building is the historic Fetterman homestead, one of Dormont’s landmarks. The razed house was more than 100 years old.
Old Pa Pitt will do the developers and Mr. Garman the justice to note that the “historic Fetterman homestead” had been butchered long before it was razed for this project. It had spent the last few decades as an apartment building, with various ramshackle additions.
Although the shopping center has been remodeled more than once, we can still get some idea of its original features. The arrangement was typical of the first generation of what we now call “strip malls”: it had two floors, with the main shops on the ground floor and miscellaneous businesses upstairs—along with a bowling alley in the basement.2 (Yes, you could hear the bowling going on in the shops.) The crest right in the middle of the building, which marks the entrance to the second floor, retains some of its Art Deco massing.
The borough of West Liberty included more than half of what is now Beechview and all of Brookline. West Liberty Avenue, as you might guess from its name, ran right down the middle of it. Today city planning maps make West Liberty Avenue the border between Beechview and Brookline, but it forms a distinct business corridor of its own.
The five-way intersection of West Liberty Avenue with Capital Avenue, Haddon Way, and Curranhill Avenue looked for a while as though it might become the core of a substantial neighborhood business district. Instead, West Liberty Avenue was taken over by the automobile business, becoming the second great automobile row in Pittsburgh (after Baum Boulevard). But these buildings remain as a little clot of neighborhood businesses among the car dealers.
In the picture above, the building at left with Slick’s Bar in it, which dates from about 1916, was designed by Charles Geisler, who at the time lived only a block up the hill from the construction site.1 The red bricks at the top (with an initial E bolted into them) probably indicate where there was once a green-tiled overhang, one of Geisler’s favorite ornaments.
A little farther up Capital Avenue we find this building, now home to a cupcake shop. The simple ornament picked out in blond brick is typical of the era around and after the First World War.
On the other side of West Liberty Avenue, this building from about 1928 was designed by the architects Smart & Scheuneman.2 For many years it has been home to a sewing-machine shop of the sort where they will not bat an eye if you bring them a hundred-year-old machine to work on.
This frame building, probably dating to the early 1900s, has been neglected for a long time—long enough that it still has its wood siding and trim.
Source: Construction Record, February 26, 1916, p. 4. “Architect Charles R. Geisler, 1933 Warnock street, awarded to Harry Bupp, 1093 Wingate avenue, the contract for erecting a two-story brick veneered hollow tile store and apartment building on Capital avenue for Henry Anmann, 103 Capital Avenue. Cost $6,500.” As built, No. 101 has three floors instead of two. On the “1923” layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps. “E. Amman” [sic] appears as owner of no. 101. Warnock Street, where Mr. Geisler lived, is now Woodward. ↩︎
Source: “Bids Taken for New 19th Ward Building,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, October 9, 1927. “Bids have been taken for a store and apartment building at West Liberty avenue and Currant [sic] street, Nineteenth Ward, for Mrs. R. M. Ousler. Smart & Scheuneman are the architects.” “R. M. Oursler” is shown as owner of this and the older building next door on a plat map. ↩︎
This building originally housed a bank, and was still a PNC branch until a few years ago. It was built in 1926, and it straddles the line between classical and Art Deco.
You know it’s a bank because it has a vomiting lion at the top of the building.
As with many banks, the elaborate stone front hides a building mostly clad in cheaper and more prosaic brick.
After many years of a drab modern front on the first floor, this building on West Liberty Avenue has been given a makeover that brings the ground floor back to something more like the original look.
