Rooftops of Beechview houses with the tower of St. Canice Church, Knoxville, in the background.
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Fall in the South Hills Neighborhoods
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
Adapting to a Vertical Lot
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6. In other cities, this lot would be unbuildable. In Pittsburgh, we just have to make some adaptations. The house (now divided into three units) has a garage around the back on the left side (where you can’t see it in this picture). Suppose you were on the ground floor, meaning the floor that is level with the street in front, and you decided to go down to your car in the garage. You would have to go down into the basement. Then you would have to go down into the other basement. Then you would have to go down into the other other basement, where the garage is. Then you would have to back your car down the steep slope from the garage to the street. Altogether, there are six levels to this house in back, though only three in front. Gaining three storeys from front to back is unusual for a house in most places; in Pittsburgh, it’s just the way we deal with the topography God gave us.
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Variations on the Pittsburgh Foursquare in Beechview
Some variants on the Pittsburgh Foursquare from one block in Beechview. They all have the same basic layout of reception hall, parlor, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor; three or four bedrooms and bathroom on the second floor; and two or more rooms on the third floor. Above, a fairly late version, probably from the 1920s. The lines are simpler and the roof is shallower.
Here is a well-preserved larger version with its original slate roof and multiple dormers. Note the arched window in the dormer. The bay on the left side of the house, which goes up from the dining room into the master bedroom, is very common in Pittsburgh Foursquares of the early 1900s. It allows cross-ventilation and ample light into those rooms in spite of the narrowness of the gap between houses.
This variant without the pyramid roof creates more room in the third floor.
A very large example of the Pittsburgh Foursquare, but the layout of rooms is more or less the same; they are just bigger rooms.
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6. Finally, a much-renovated house with a gambrel roof, which probably has more room on the third floor in proportion to its size than any of the others.
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Under the Asphalt
Scratch the asphalt of any Pittsburgh street—like this one in Beechview, which had just been milled in preparation for repaving—and you will find bricks if the street is relatively flat, or Belgian block if it is on a steep slope or in a heavy-traffic area.
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Rebuilding the Red Line
The Red Line has been closed between South Hills Junction and Potomac for extensive reconstruction. The workers did not dally: as soon as the line was closed, it was covered with construction equipment, and Pittsburgh Regional Transit has posted signs at all the shuttle-bus stops informing us that the line will reopen on schedule September 1. Here we see the Hampshire Avenue grade crossing under reconstruction.
This road looks about as closed as it can get.
Newly laid track at the Westfield stop, whose platforms have also had extensive work. The track is Pennsylvania Broad Gauge, a relic of the laws that prohibited streetcar companies from using standard-gauge track out of well-founded fear that a secret deal with the railroad companies would send freight trains down the middle of city streets.
New track along Suburban Avenue.
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Krebs Building, Beechview
This building on Beechview Avenue is good training in urban archaeology. We can see the changes it has gone through and guess at what it might have looked like when it was new.
We notice, for example, that the windows on the third floor are rectangular, but the holes for them are arched. Likewise, the windows on the second floor are too small for their holes. Luckily the window-replacement project was done without serious alterations to the underlying wall, so it will be possible for a prosperous future owner to install windows that fit the holes.
We can also see that the ground floor was originally a storefront. It has been turned into another apartment, as often happens in neighborhoods where the commercial district has shrunk.
What are we to make of those wood shingles that hang over the first floor? They probably were installed in the 1970s, when such things were popular; they would have served the two purposes of covering the original signboard above the store and giving both entrances of the building a bit of key-fumbling shelter.
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Olympic Theatre, Beechview
This silent-era neighborhood movie palace has a circular history. It was built as the Olympic Theatre; when the theater closed, the building became an American Legion hall and remained in the Legion’s hands for decades; then it was converted to a nursing home. In 2019, a video-production company called Cut ‘N’ Run Productions (with an officially backwards apostrophe before the N about which old Pa Pitt can do nothing) spent a good bit of money making the building look like itself again, and it is once again in the movie business and looking splendid.
That little alley to the right of the theater is Parody Way, one of Father Pitt’s favorite alley names in Pittsburgh.
We also have a picture of the building in the middle of its restoration.
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Boylan Building, Beechview, in 1930
The Boylan Building in Beechview, as photographed on February 18, 1930, by a Pittsburgh city photographer.1 We can see that the second floor was an open space useful for all sorts of things—a bowling alley and pool hall, but also dances and basketball games. The barber shop at the left end prominently advertises that it is a UNION SHOP; non-union barber shops were prone to mysterious explosions.
The picture below was taken in 2021 (and nothing substantial has changed since then), so we can see how sensitively this building has been restored for use as a community center. The corner entrance on the left has been filled in, but on the whole the building is pretty much as it was almost a century ago—except that it’s in better shape now.
- Thanks to our alert correspondent David Schwing for pointing this picture out in the Historic Pittsburgh collection. We have brightened the picture just a bit to make the details of the building more visible. ↩︎
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Made in USSR
So the lens says, though the camera says “Sony.” Father Pitt happened to be in Beechview today, so here is a typical Beechview streetscape as seen by an old Soviet “Индустар” (“Industar”) lens, a copy of the Zeiss Tessar, mounted on a Sony Alpha 3000 camera.
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Saw Mill Run at Seldom Seen
We saw the movie version yesterday, and now here are two still pictures of the vigorously moving Saw Mill Run at Seldom Seen.
And here is a picture of the path leading toward the Arch and the railroad viaducts:
