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.
The entrance to the station was right at bridge level, with a grand staircase down into the grand concourse.
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.
The Bell System emblem.
More pictures of the building, including the unique clock and globe (unfortunately out of order).
Like many other streets that appear on the maps of hilly neighborhoods, Milo Street is entirely stairs. Whenever you see a street sign that seems to be pointing off the edge of a cliff, a stairway like this is usually the explanation.
Dried staghorns of Rhus typhina along the Monongahela River.
Baywood Street is a typical street of upper-middle-class foursquares in East Liberty, mostly well preserved. Several have been turned into duplexes, but without much damage to the outlines of the house, as in the example below—where you should pay particular attention to the exceptionally fine round oriel on the second floor (and ignore the slightly mutilated dormer). The houses on the northeast side of the 5500 block are all the same dimensions and the same basic design, but with the fronts varied enough to make a pleasing diversity; they seem to have been built all at once at some time between 1903 and 1910, all designed with the same pencil.
Looking eastward from the pedestrian bridge at Gateway Center Park.
Thornburg is a small borough in the Chartiers valley where we can find what is probably the best group of Shingle-style houses in the Pittsburgh area. There is some good evidence that most of them were designed by Edward M. Butz, an architect whose most famous work is the Western Penitentiary. The Shingle style is rare in Pittsburgh, and though the houses are in a wide variety of forms, they share certain quirks—the second floor overhanging the first, the use of masonry for the first floor and shingles above, the exaggerated eaves—that suggest the hand of one architect in the different designs.
Built in about 1933, the Haller Baking Company was designed in an up-to-the-minute Art Deco style by Paul Scheuneman. You can see a picture of the building as it originally appeared at the Avonworth Historical Society. “Oven to Home” was the company’s slogan: it delivered bread, cakes, and other baked goods straight to your house. In the 1950s the building was turned into a furniture store, with glassy additions in front that were later bricked in when it became an office.
Father Pitt does not know the origin of this stylish compass rose. It does not look new, but it is not in the photographs of the bakery or the furniture store that replaced it.
There’s not much to see in the rear of the building, but old Pa Pitt climbed the hill to document it anyway, just for the sake of completeness.
The Monongahela Incline on a rainy day. The incline opened in 1870, but the ornate lower station was built in 1904; it was designed by MacClure & Spahr.
Old maps seem to show that this house was built in the 1880s. The storefront is probably a later addition put on when Brownsville Road became the main shopping street of Mount Oliver. It has been very neatly refurbished for its current tenant, a gourmet cheese shop called “The Cheese Queen.” But before its windows were replaced a few years ago, the upper floors had the kind of three-over-one windows that were popular in the 1920s, just when the commercial strip on Brownsville Road was rapidly developing. Those two observations probably date the time this typical 1800s Pittsburgh frame house was converted to a store with apartment above.
