Birmingham was the oldest and most populous of the four boroughs that were taken into Pittsburgh as the South Side in 1871. The eastern border was today’s South 17th Street, where East Birmingham began, and the border is still marked by Carson Street suddenly becoming wider and the rest of the parallel streets refusing to line up.
The East Carson Street Historic District covers Carson Street in both the Birmingham and East Birmingham parts of the South Side, which together make up one of the country’s best-preserved Victorian commercial streetscapes. Here are some buildings on three blocks of the narrow part of Carson Street in old Birmingham.
The Civil War monument was a grand and expensive construction on Monument Hill—which was named for it—dedicated in 1871. Today Monument Hill is covered with buildings of the Community College of Allegheny County; the monument was moved to its present location in 1931, where it looks over Lake Elizabeth in West Park. When it was moved, it was substantially redesigned, but many parts of the old monument were incorporated in the new one.
This part of the shaft, for example, which is now near the base, was the whole column of the original monument, as we see in this old postcard:
The statue of Fame on top of the monument was damaged by a lightning strike in 2008; the repaired monument was rededicated in 2016.
An eagle examines us from behind the Allegheny County arms.
The left half of the inscription: “Erected to the memory of the 4,000 brave men of Allegheny County who fell in the great struggle to maintain the integrity of our Union. The eye of God rests upon their graves even when unmarked by man, and their sleeping dust shall arise in the morning of the resurrection.”
The right half is taken from the end of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Generally known as Soldiers and Sailors Hall, and officially the Soldiers and Sailors National Military Museum and Memorial. Of our half-dozen (at least) buildings inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, this is the most literal interpretation. Henry Hornbostel was the architect.
Some miscellaneous views of Gateway Center from Point State Park. Above: One Gateway Center. Irwin Clavan, working for Eggers & Higgins, designed the three original Gateway Center towers, which he meant to be Le Corbusier imitations in brick, but which—possibly after intervention from Eggers & Higgins themselves—ended up being coated with the chrome-alloyed steel that makes them uniquely beautiful.
The Hilton, now the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown, was designed by William Tabler, who was the Hilton company architect. Originally it was coated in shiny gold, but the gold was painted over years ago.
Gateway Towers was designed by the firm of Emery Roth & Sons. Mr. Roth himself was too dead to do any of the design work, having died sixteen years before this building opened in 1964.
Acorn Hill is the little enclave of interesting and eclectic houses at the southern end of Observatory Hill, where Marshall Avenue meets Perrysville Avenue. Old maps show us that this house was here by 1872, owned by Thomas Marshall, who at that time owned the land that would later become Acorn Hill. It remained in the Marshall family, for whom Marshall Avenue and Marshall Road were named, for many years after they had sold off most of the rest of the land for development. A neighborhood historian may be able to tell us more, so comments are welcome.
The house has been sheathed in aluminum siding, but its Second Empire tower still stands proud, with its little decorative railing at the top to suggest that a miniature sea captain’s wife could stand at the top to watch for her husband’s toy boat coming in to port.
A few more details of this splendid church, built in 1897, which probably will not stand much longer—although the demolition order had been removed from the front door when old Pa Pitt visited most recently. The architect was Frederick Sauer.1 We have many more pictures in an earlier article.
If the church is demolished, Father Pitt will buy these hinges. He has no idea where he would put them or even whether he could lift one, but they ought to be preserved.
We’ve seen this little church before, where we also learned some of its history, but we need no excuse for seeing it again other than that it is a charming little church with a long history. Built for a Lutheran congregation in 1894, it was sold to the African Methodist Episcopal congregation only eleven years later, and they worshiped here for a century.
