Father Pitt

Why should the beautiful die?


Urban Archaeology: The Hotel Henry

Fragment of a plate from the Hotel Henry

One never knows what may turn up at an old homesite. The Seldom Seen Greenway on the border of Beechview and Mount Washington is forest now, with Saw Mill Run gushing merrily through it. But Seldom Seen was a little village of its own once, and the old homesites are full of broken plates and bottles and other items of intense archaeological interest. Here is a plate from the Hotel Henry, once a grand hotel on Fifth Avenue, but torn down in the 1950s to make way for a modernist skyscraper. Was it bought or stolen from the hotel? We’ll never know.

The Historic Pittsburgh site has a good picture of the Hotel Henry as it appeared in about 1900.

Do you need a copy of the hotel’s logo in scalable form? Probably not, but old Pa Pitt has reconstructed it for you anyway:

See a random picture
and become a better person

You could buy this book
if you wanted a book.

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