Almost 24 years ago, old Pa Pitt had occasion to wait on the inbound platform of the Westfield stop on what was then the Route 42 streetcar line. The picture above was taken in March of 2001. The other day Father Pitt found himself at the same spot and took a similar picture, with sun instead of snow.
Not much is different, because Beechview is a neighborhood that changes slowly. A few trees along Rockland Avenue in the background have grown. The automobiles are more recent models. The most obvious difference is the stop itself, where the sodium-vapor lights have been replaced with LEDs and the old brown sign has been replaced with a blue one. The destination no longer mentions Library, because Library cars no longer run on this route (they go through Overbrook instead).
The picture above required a lot of manipulation: it was built from three separate photographs at different exposures in order to capture the detail in both the light and misty distance and the dark railroad ties in the foreground. The result may look a little artificial, but it makes a good illustration of the bridge. The pictures below, with no relevant details in the foreground, are less manipulated.
St. Henry Church has been abandoned for years, and it is slowly rotting away. Yet the neighborhood still remembers it as a point of pride: when Father Pitt was taking pictures along Arlington Avenue the other day, some locals stopped to talk and immediately asked, “Did you see our church?”
And, of course, our utility cables.
St. Henry was designed by Marlier & Johnstone and built in 1952, when the neighborhood was thriving.
Each of those squares had a symbolic relief at its center, with a big metal cross in the middle of the façade. Those have all been taken away, because when Catholics abandon a building, they generally preserve whatever is unique and valuable about it and place it in another parish if possible. It does leave the building looking stripped, but we can understand the impulse.
The entrance is sharply drawn in a style that flavors modern with just a bit of late Art Deco.
An abstract cross-topped cupola.
An exhibition of utility cables.
The rectory is older than the church; it is hard to guess the age of it, and it has been added to in various eras and various styles.
The school next to the church has been abandoned twice. It was a public primary school for a while after the parochial school closed, but the public school closed a few years ago.
Built in 1905–1909, St. Andrew’s was designed by Carpenter & Crocker, who seem to have been favorites among the Episcopalians of Pittsburgh: they also designed the parish house for the cathedral downtown and St. James’ in Homewood, now the Church of the Holy Cross. This building is dominated by its outsized tower.
Very grouchy gargoyles guard the tower.
An ornamental pinnacle on one corner of the tower.
Cedarhurst Manor is a plan where many of the houses date from the Depression era—a time, as Father Pitt has pointed out before, when there was a good bit of home construction going on, because conventional wisdom held that, if you had the money for a house, it was more economical to take advantage of low labor and materials costs and build a new one than to buy an older house. The plan is not included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District (at least not yet), but many of the houses are distinguished architecturally and well preserved.
Arlington Avenue is the business spine of the Arlington neighborhood, although not much business is left. Still, things are picking up, and there are more businesses now than there were a couple of years ago. The buildings on the street share certain similarities in style, but the thing a visitor will notice first is that very few of them are rectangles. Most of them are parallelograms or trapezoids. In these pictures, when you see buildings where the walls do not seem to meet at right angles, that is not because of distorted perspective from a wide-angle or telephoto lens. It is because the walls do not meet at right angles, as we see in this building, with an acute angle on the corner. Note also the cheaper red brick on the side wall, with the expensive Kittanning brick used only on the front.
Arlington Avenue is also a gourmet feast for lovers of utility cables.
The building above is the only one of the storefronts for which old Pa Pitt has an architect’s name: Edward Goldbach, who lived just down the hill from the building. It is quite possible that we will eventually find Mr. Goldbach’s name attached to several other buildings on the street: many of them share similar design principles and a similar taste for yellow Kittanning brick.
The little frame store at left is yet another skewed parallelogram.
These buildings are all skewed.
This Second Empire building was actually rectangular, but the modern storefront addition filled out the lot and made an acute angle.
These cellular masts probably make a large contribution to the economy of the Arlington Avenue business district. And here is our most artistic arrangement of utility cables yet.
This Second Empire building, on the other hand, took full advantage of the whole lot, leaving it with an obtuse angle at the corner.
These buildings are skewed in different ways, just to make sure the streetscape is never boring.
Back in 1968, the streetcar fan David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA, took this picture of a PCC car in front of the freight office for the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad. Except for looking cleaner, the building hasn’t changed much. Streetcars no longer pass in front of it, but they stop diagonally across the street at the Station Square station.
The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie could not quite get a foothold downtown, but it had the next best thing: a station right on the Smithfield Street Bridge, so that it was only a short walk from downtown to the P&LE trains—or a short trolley ride, since the streetcars ran on the bridge.
Dowler & Dowler, father-and-son architects, designed this building for the Bell System’s western headquarters in Pennsylvania. We have seen the building from this angle before, but we have not seen it with a bus coming toward you, which is always an improvement.
The Stanwix Street front has a Miesian colonnaded porch, with a cheerful abstract mosaic ceiling.
Those cheerful square polka dots also show up in other parts of the building.
The cornerstone, with its late-Art-Deco lettering and date.
