Louis Bellinger

Louis Arnett Stuart Bellinger was born on the ninth of December 1891 at Sumter, South Carolina, the son of John Wesley Bellinger — a Methodist minister — and Lula Mason Bellinger. He was raised in the AME parsonage Black South Carolina of the post-Reconstruction period and educated at the Browning Home of the Mather Academy at Camden, South Carolina.

He enrolled in 1910 at the Howard University at Washington, D.C., and completed the Bachelor of Architecture there in 1914 — among the first ten Black architectural graduates in the United States. He took graduate study in architectural engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh from 1914 to 1916.

He served the United States Army during the European war from 1917 to 1919, attached to the 92nd Infantry Division at the western front.

He was registered in 1921 as the first African American architect of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and opened his practice at the Hill District of Pittsburgh in the same year. He served the Pittsburgh Black community from the Hill District practice for the remaining twenty-five years of his life.

He designed across the following twenty-five years over forty principal buildings of the Pittsburgh Black community — among them the Pythian Temple at Pittsburgh (1928), the Centre Avenue YMCA at Pittsburgh (1923), and the Schenley Heights Community Centre (1933).

He completed in 1930 the Greenlee Field at Bedford Avenue and Junilla Street in the Hill District, Pittsburgh — the seven-thousand-five-hundred-seat baseball stadium of the Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro National League franchise of Gus Greenlee, the principal Black-owned professional sports facility of the period. The field opened on the twenty-ninth of April 1932 and was the home stadium of the Crawfords through their championship years of 1933, 1935 and 1936.

He was named in 1944 to the Pittsburgh Housing Authority architectural advisory board — the first Black member of the board.

He died at Pittsburgh on the second of June 1946 of a heart attack, at fifty-four.

He is honored here as the architect of the Greenlee Field.