Climbers scrubbing the stone wall above Saw Mill Run outside the Seldom Seen Arch.
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Cleaning the Wall at Seldom Seen
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Seldom Seen Arch
This fine arched tunnel, stone faced with a brick interior, was built as part of the great Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway boondoggle, one of the boondoggliest boondoggles in a city known for boondoggles.
Just off Saw Mill Run Boulevard is a little parking lot. You have to look for it: it’s on the turnoff to Woodruff Street, and it’s almost invisible till you’re right there. From there you can reach the arch, which is well worth a visit for its own sake. The interior in particular is more interesting than interiors of tunnels usually are. The engineers had fun with this one.
If you walk through the tunnel into the green world beyond, you’ll find that you’re walking on a broad path of gravel and occasional asphalt. This was Watkins Lane, the only way into a little farm village called Seldom Seen, or Shalerville before that. Like a surprising number of isolated bits of the city of Pittsburgh, it remained a farming village, with farming, even into the twentieth century. It was abandoned by some time in the 1960s, and the forest has reclaimed it. We’ll see more of Seldom Seen in the future.
Stream valleys in the Pittsburgh area are valuable as being the only nearly level routes through the landscape, and you will never find a major stream valley without railroad tracks in it. But as we can see here, the Saw Mill Run valley has had three railroads in it at once, one of which is still active.
In the spring Saw Mill Run is often a raging torrent, but it is much more placid in the summer.
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Beechview Theater Under Renovation
A videography and photography company that has been in business for some years is renovating the old Beechview Theater. This was a silent-movie house built before 1914 (since it appears in a guide to Pittsburgh published that year, in which Beechview is described as “beyond the South Hills”); after its movie days, it spent a long time as an American Legion post, and then for a while it was a nursing home. Old Pa Pitt hopes it will be loved in its new career that brings it back very close to its roots.
An update: According to a 1923 map, this was called the Olympic Theater. There were at least three theaters in Beechview in 1923. See the theater in its restored state here.
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Siemens SD-400 Trolley
Here are two pictures especially for trolley geeks. These 4200-series Siemens cars (this one is number 4232) were bought in the 1980s and completely rebuilt in the 2000s. They make up about two-thirds of the fleet. They are very similar to the later CAF cars, but easily distinguished by the two headlights in the center (rather than at the sides) and the “cyclops eye” high beam mounted on the roof. Of course, they are also easily distinguished by being numbered in the 4200 series; the CAF cars make up the 4300 series. This car is southbound on the Red Line, heading for central Beechview.
The picture above gives us a good look at what old Pa Pitt calls the “Pittsburgh door,” the extra street-level doors that have to be added to all Pittsburgh trolleys to deal with our odd combination of platform-level stations and street-level stops.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A540 (hacked).
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Cloudburst over Beechview
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Chimney at Sunset
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The View from Beechview
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Sunset Over Beechview
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Magnolias
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The Transformation of Beechview
Suburban riders on the Red Line, if they have ever lifted their eyes from their iPhones for a moment, must have noticed the peculiar anomaly of Beechview: a tidy and pleasant residential neighborhood with an almost abandoned business district. A good part of the abandonment was the result of a scandal-ridden failed urban-renewal project, in which the city gave millions to a private developer who vanished with most of the money.
But now the mess is nearly sorted out, and storefronts in Beechview are filling up with interesting and useful businesses.
The big accomplishment was finding someone to open a new supermarket, which will anchor the whole business district. The owner of the new Market on Broadway already has some experience operating a successful urban market in Oakland, the Market on Forbes.
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A new neighborhood coffeehouse gives the locals a place to gather and gossip.
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This 1920s-vintage storefront has been beautifully restored for the new Crested Duck Charcuterie, which will be an interesting addition to a neighborhood more accustomed to spaghetti and meatballs in a church basement.
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A neighborhood artist has taken over this little building that was abandoned when the ESB Bank moved to larger quarters across the street.
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Eventually, this clothing store will have a name other than “Grand Opening.”
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All these new businesses face an uphill struggle; most new businesses fail, and Beechview residents themselves, who learned to go elsewhere for shopping, will have to be lured back to their own business district. But Beechview, aside from a strong sense of community, has one great strength most other neighborhoods lack: the Red Line, which brings rail transit right to the center of the business district. Perhaps some of those suburban riders will glance up from their iPhones, see the new Beechview, and start to think of it as a place for dining and shopping.We’ll see.
