A long row of mansard-roofed frame houses whose various alterations have not completely diminished the impressive effect of the row.
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Modernistic Apartment Building on Walnut Street, Shadyside
Shadyside seems to have a larger concentration of modernistic mid-twentieth-century apartment buildings than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood. Without any other information, old Pa Pitt would guess this one dates from about 1940.
Glass block from Pittsburgh Corning became a badge of modernity. If that were not enough, the metal awning over the entrance should do it.
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McNaugher Memorial United Presbyterian Church, Fineview
This little church—now converted to a private home—presents a bricky front to the world in a typically Pittsburgh Romanesque style.
But the front is only a few feet deep; it is attached to a modest frame building.
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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Negley Station on the East Busway
The Negley Station is an easy walk from both the Ellsworth Avenue and Walnut Street business districts in Shadyside, as well as businesses on Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard. Like most busway stations in Pittsburgh, it is a direct replacement for an old commuter-rail station: in this case, the Roup station that used to be at exactly the same place. (South Negley Avenue was part of Roup Street until the 1890s, and rail stations tend to keep their names even when the street for which they are named changes.)
Commuters gather on the inbound platform in late morning rush hour.
And here come the buses.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens. The outbound platform in evening sunlight.
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Between the Skyscrapers
A view from Fifth Avenue between Three and One PNC Plaza toward Two PNC Plaza and the K&L Gates Center.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Centre Villa Court, Friendship
On an otherwise commercialized section of Centre Avenue, this little U-shaped terrace of rowhouses is almost invisible. As in Dover Gables, the fronts are arranged around a vehicle-free garden court.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.
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Kaufmann & Baer Department Store
“The Kaufmann & Baer department store is an enormous shiny white terra cotta building, filled with windows and probably good for its purpose.” So the architect Aymar Embury II (did ever an architect have such an architecty name?) dismissed this building in his article about Pittsburgh architecture in 1915,1 when the building was new. It was put up for Kaufmann & Baer—the Kaufmanns being members of the same family as Morris Kaufmann, who ran that other department store with a similar name on Smithfield Street. Most older Pittsburghers remember it affectionately as the Gimbels Building, because Gimbels bought Kaufmann & Baer in 1925 and this building was Gimbels for most of its life as a department store. Starrett & Van Vleck, New York specialists in department stores, were the architects.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Three Houses on Howe Street, Shadyside
The eastern part of Howe Street grew a fine collection of upper-middle-class houses around the turn of the twentieth century. Here are three in three different styles, beginning with a fine Dutch colonial. The entrance has been altered to make the house an apartment building, but otherwise the details are in good shape.
Here is a sturdy foursquare house with Queen Anne details.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. Finally, a Tudor with an imaginative randomness made even more random by later alterations and additions.
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Rue Grande Vue, Elliott
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. Grandview Avenue on Mount Washington is the famous street-with-a-view in Pittsburgh, but the more pretentiously named Rue Grande Vue in Elliott has quite a view, too. Because Elliott is an out-of-the-way West End neighborhood that few Pittsburghers have even heard of, the houses here are modest and—by most standards—affordable.
The name of the street sounds like something a 1950s developer would come up with because you told him “Grandview Avenue” was taken, but in fact it seems to go back at least to the 1880s. It went through some strange permutations. An 1882 plat map shows it as “Rue Grande Vee,” which probably means somebody pronounced it in French and somebody else wrote down what he thought he heard. An 1890 plat map shows it as “Pine Grand Rue.” By the early 1900s, it was Rue Grande Vue in Chartiers Township (later taken into the city) and partly Pinerue and partly Rush Street in the section that had been taken into Pittsburgh. By 1910 the southeastern section was all Pinerue Avenue; the discontinuous northwestern section was still Rue Grande Vue. At some point the southeastern portion changed back to Rue Grande Vue, but the northwestern portion changed to Rudd Street, and old Pa Pitt has exhausted his patience and will not go looking for exactly when those things happened.
Although the street signs say “Rue Grande Vue,” most maps show the street as Rue Grande Vue Street, following the usual American custom of doubling foreign words we don’t understand.
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