The little rowhouses on Pierce Street were built as rental properties for Andrew W. Mellon, who was not too rich to squeeze a few pennies out of working-class tenants. The houses had a fine location right next to the Roup station on the main commuter-rail line to the east, and they are still right next to its successor, the Negley station on the East Busway. Old Pa Pitt visited them on an August evening, and the fact that these pictures are appearing only now shows how backed up we sometimes get around here. We have some history of the Pierce Street rowhouses in an earlier article.
Pierce Street is unusual in Pittsburgh; it looks more like a street in Baltimore, with an entire block of identical houses all built more or less as one building, their fronts right against the sidewalk.
A few of the houses on one side of the street have disappeared, replaced by parking lot; but the streetscape is still intact enough to show us what it originally looked like.
It appears that most of the houses are in the hands of the same owner and kept up beautifully with identical stoop plantings.
Not all of them, however; a couple are still obviously in private hands and were not repointed when the rest of the houses were restored.
This corner house was left isolated when a few houses to the left were demolished.
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