New Kensington Downtown Historic District

Downtown New Kensington is a grid of two- and three-story commercial blocks, residential streets and public buildings laid out when the city was platted in 1891. Its core runs along Fourth and Fifth Avenues between Eighth and Tenth Streets, where brick storefronts with bulkheads, display windows and decorative cornices line the sidewalks. Notable buildings include the Mellon Bank Building of 1900, the PNC Bank of 1914, and the Wear Ever Building of 1914-1915, designed by James Geisey in the Tudor Revival style for the cookware subsidiary of Alcoa. The district also holds the 1933 post office and three surviving theaters, among them the Ritz Theater of 1921-22. Its houses, mostly wood frame American Four Square and Colonial Revival types, were built largely between 1895 and 1920 for aluminum workers. The district is regarded as an example of a working class industrial community of the early twentieth century.