Arlington Avenue was already looking a bit bedraggled in 1968, when David Wilson, a streetcar fanatic who documented the streetcar lines of Pittsburgh with hundreds of pictures, caught the Route 48 car peeking out of the streetcar loop.
Most of the buildings in this picture are still there on Arlington Avenue, but the Arlington business district has mostly been abandoned by business. The storefronts that are not empty have been filled in for apartments.
This one, with a much-altered ground floor, is still going as a convenience store. Because the street plan in Arlington is irregular, many of the commercial buildings on Arlington Avenue are odd shapes.
This little storefront has been filled in by a contractor who had no need of a busybody architect to tell him what to do. The original building is a pleasing little composition by someone who might have seen some of the German art magazines that circulated among architects in Pittsburgh.
A little of the Kittanning brick facing has come down from the front of this building, revealing the cheaper ordinary brick behind it.
Now, about that streetcar loop: we’ll be seeing that very soon, because it is still there as well, or at least partly so.
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