The first thing Eleanor Svec does when she unlocks the door at In the Frame each morning is fill the electric kettle. Not because anyone’s asked her to. Just because it’s what you do when you’ve been running a framing shop and gallery in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood for two decades and you’ve learned that people who carry art under their arms are usually also people who could use five minutes and a cup of tea.
In the Frame sits on Butler Street, a stretch that’s cycled through enough identities in the past twenty years to give you whiplash. Eleanor watched it happen from the same storefront. She opened in 2004, when the rents were low and the foot traffic was thin and nobody was writing about Lawrenceville in any magazine. She had a background in fine art printing and a tolerance for financial uncertainty that she describes, with a dry laugh, as “probably not healthy.”
The shop does custom framing — that’s the core of it — but calling it just a framing shop is like calling a good hardware store just a place to buy nails. Eleanor knows paper. She knows the difference between conservation glass and museum glass and when the price difference is actually worth it and when a client is being sold something they don’t need. She’ll tell you which, directly, even if it costs her the upsell. That reputation has kept her in business longer than most of the restaurants that have opened and closed around her.
Along one wall, she hangs work by local artists on a rolling basis — no formal application, no committee, just people she’s met and whose work she believes in. Some of them have gone on to show at serious galleries. Most haven’t, and she frames their work with the same care either way. Right now there’s a series of small oil paintings by a retired steelworker from Hazelwood who started painting in his sixties. The prices are modest. Eleanor doesn’t take a commission that would price them out of reach.
Framing isn’t cheap, and it shouldn’t be — good framing involves skilled handwork and quality materials, and Eleanor doesn’t pretend otherwise. A standard custom job runs somewhere between $80 and $200 depending on size and materials, which is competitive for the quality. She’s not the place to go if you need something fast and cheap. She is the place to go if you have something that matters.
She’s also just good company. On a slow Tuesday afternoon, she’ll talk to you about the history of lithography, or about the time a customer brought in a water-damaged print that turned out to be a genuine nineteenth-century map of Pittsburgh, or about the particular satisfaction of stretching a canvas correctly — “most people do it wrong,” she says, without malice, just as fact.
Butler Street has gotten busier and more expensive and more photographed. Eleanor is aware of this. She doesn’t resent it exactly, but she doesn’t romanticize it either. “It got harder to park,” she says. “The kettle still works the same.”
In the Frame is open Tuesday through Saturday, roughly 10 to 6, though Eleanor’s hours have always been somewhat approximate. Call ahead if you’re making a special trip. It’s worth making the trip.
