Parking garages sometimes give us good views of the surrounding buildings, and no one questions your right to be there as long as you look respectable enough. (The powdered wig helps.) Here are three interesting houses on Aiken Avenue seen from the Shadyside Hospital garage. First, an unusually well-preserved Shingle-style house with a lush crop of shingles.
This Queen Anne house has been turned into seven apartments, to judge by counting mailboxes and doorbells.
Finally, this mansion in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Colonial style has grown an apartment building in its back yard, a disease to which some old houses are subject in urban neighborhoods. It appears on Google Maps as a “community correction center,” so if you make a mistake in typing you can probably come here to have it corrected professionally. Old Pa Pitt prefers to make his own corrections, but he is glad there is a service for people who need it.
One of the first commissions for the new firm of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow in Pittsburgh was the Duquesne Club, which is still Pittsburgh’s most prestigious club. The brownstone Renaissance palace was put up in 1887–1889 and expanded later. Above, a composite picture made from six individual photographs.
Chartiers Creek, as it runs through the middle of Carnegie, is a placid minor river—most of the time. Every once in a while it becomes a raging demon and floods most of the town. Here we see the Main Street bridge, with the Husler Building at right.
Much of the original Magee Hospital, designed by Edward Stotz, is still standing, but so many additions have grown up around the buildings that we can only catch occasional glimpses of them. While old Pa Pitt was paying a visit to someone in the hospital, he noticed this view in an interior courtyard. Magee Hospital merged with Pittsburgh Woman’s Hospital to form Magee-Womens Hospital, now UPMC Magee-Womens. Eventually, if UPMC expands its empire enough, it will be able to afford an apostrophe.
Yesterday we spoke of the busways as bus rapid transit done right. Here we see it done…the other way. The new University Line will be what counts as “bus rapid transit” in most other cities: there will be dedicated lanes for the buses most of the way, but they will have to deal with traffic lights and dozens of at-grade intersections to get from downtown to Oakland.
Nevertheless, this will be leagues better than what we have now to get from downtown to Oakland, which is stacks of buses tied up in rush-hour traffic. Instead of street corners with little signs sticking out of poles to mark them as bus stops, we’ll have these sharp-looking stations, which will provide some shelter from the rain and a few amenities like farecard vending machines and emergency telephones. (Can you get emergency cat videos on those emergency telephones?) Here are two of the nearly complete stations downtown: Market Square, which is a short block from the Diamond, and Wood Street, which is right across the street from the Wood Street subway station.
Addendum: A correspondent pointed out what we neglected to mention: that traffic lights at intersections will be synchronized to let buses pass through expeditiously. This is an important detail, and it is certainly true that it will make the system considerably swifter than it would be if the buses had to wait for the usual cycles. We reiterate that this will be much better than what we have now. Father Pitt would prefer a subway, but he doesn’t always get what he wants, and he is grateful for what he does get.
Like the Crafton station, the Ingram station on the West Busway is almost exactly where the old commuter-rail station used to be.
The busways in Pittsburgh are extraordinary accomplishments that we seldom appreciate. They are true metro lines for buses, making it possible for commuters to rocket through crowded urban neighborhoods at expressway speeds. Father Pitt always thinks rail transit would be better, but Pittsburgh stands out both as the inventor of “bus rapid transit” and as one of the few cities where “bus rapid transit” was done right.
Here is a drawing of Rowe’s department store that was published in 1907, when East Liberty was booming as it became the business hub for rapidly developing East End neighborhoods. The building, put up in 1898, still looks much the same today, though it has been many years since it housed a department store. By choosing Alden & Harlow, the most prestigious firm in the city, as his architects, Mr. Rowe declared to East End residents that he would offer them as high a class of merchandise as they could find anywhere downtown.
The drawing came from a lavishly illustrated book published in 1907 by the Pittsburg Board of Trade—a book that, oddly, has two titles: Up-Town: Greater Pittsburg’s Classic Section/East End: The World’s Most Beautiful Suburb. Here is what the book tells us about Rowe’s:
C. H. ROWE CO.
To the residents of the East End the department store of C. H. Rowe Company, at Penn and Highland avenues, is a household word. Little can be said of it which every woman and child does not already know, yet no history of the development of the East End would be complete without mention of this enterprising company.
It was in 1898 that C. H. Rowe Co. began to relieve the residents of the East End of the necessity of going down town to meet any requirements they had in the matter of dress goods, undermuslins, white goods of every description, millinery, children’s outfittings, all that the feminine domestic economy required.
Such enterprise as the firm of C. H. Rowe Co. has shown has naturally received a hearty response from the residents of the East End. The aim of this section of the city is to provide every want that its citizens require. So far as the dry goods business is concerned that is what this company has done.
It takes a modern four-story establishment, with 58,000 square feet of floor space to accommodate the company’s stock of goods. It requires 125 persons in the dullest season to attend the wants of the customers of C. H. Rowe Company and many delivery wagons are employed in distributing the goods to such customers who prefer that accommodation.
The directors of the company include Messrs. C. H. and W. H. Rowe, D. P. Black, H. P. Pears and J. H. McCrady. James S. Mackie is the general manager.
It is little wonder with such attention to all the requirements of the East End public that C. H. Rowe Company’s store has become the veritable center of the East End trade, and that its growth is so much a matter of pride not only to the members of the firm but to the residents of the entire East Liberty community.
Built in 1852 for a congregation established in 1765, Old St. Luke’s is a picturesque country church with a churchyard stuffed with Revolutionary War veterans. For some time it was abandoned and falling to bits, but over the past few decades careful restoration has gradually turned it into a picture-perfect wedding chapel. Much work has recently been put into the churchyard, with illegible tombstones supplemented by new granite monuments that duplicate the old inscriptions.
This plaque honors congregation founder John Neville, George Washington’s childhood friend and the man who, as tax collector for the district, found himself on the wrong side of the Whiskey Rebellion. His house at Bower Hill was burned by the rebels. The plaque was installed only when everyone who would have spat on it was dead.
This huge oak is probably as old as the congregation, and certainly older than the present building. It was recently recognized as a “witness tree”—a tree that has seen the whole history of the United States from the beginning. Wisely, the tree keeps its opinions on that history to itself.
Press C. Dowler, who designed several other schools and public buildings in the Chartiers Valley, was the architect of this school, which was built in 1914. It is no longer in use, but the building is in good shape.
Throughout his long career, which went from Romanesque through classical through Art Deco to modernism, Dowler used simple materials to weave interesting geometric decorations.
The last time Father Pitt took a picture of the Natatorium Building, later the Strand Theatre, was ten years ago. Since then tenants have come and gone, and murals have appeared on the side. When old Pa Pitt walked past recently, some internal construction was going on, suggesting that the building is getting ready for its next adventure.
The architect of the original building, put up in 1907, was R. B. Melvin, who designed the high-class bathhouse with obvious references—especially in the arch over the entrance—to the Baths of Caracalla. Later, the building was remodeled as a movie theater by architect George Schwan.
