Many butterflies have colorful wings, but the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) has a body to match, as we can see in this close view. This is one of our most spectacularly beautiful butterflies, and one of our most common as well.
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Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus)
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Stained Glass in Beechview
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Romantic Monument
This monument in the Victorian Romantic style is such a jumble of metaphors that old Pa Pitt is reluctant to try to untangle it. A number of elements—calla, ferns, cushion, scroll, drapery, rustic seat—are rendered individually with great realism, but thrown together in an extraordinarily unlikely way. The monument can be found (but probably won’t be found by most people) in a nearly forgotten German Lutheran cemetery on a hillside in Beechview.
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Digging Out
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Parking Chair
When the snow is deep and every parking space represents half a day’s work, the parking chairs come out in full force. Chairs are traditional guardians of residents’ parking rights in city neighborhoods where driveways are rare; though they are not strictly legal, they have the force of etiquette, which is stronger than law. The driver who would move someone else’s chair to park in the space it guards is capable of any enormity. Usually the chairs are half-broken kitchen chairs kept in the basement for just this purpose, but this particularly elegant chair reserved a spot in Beechview. Whether the bird feeder is functional or ornamental is a question old Pa Pitt was not able to answer.
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Snow on Belgian Block
A frosty morning on one of the many Belgian-block streets in Beechview. In neighborhoods of this vintage (about the beginning of the twentieth century), Belgian block was usually reserved for steep hills like this one, and cheaper brick pavements used for the flat spots. Brick lasts almost as long as Belgian block, but it gives very poor traction in wet or icy conditions.
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Fallowfield Viaduct
Late-afternoon sun catches a Route 42C train headed inbound across Dagmar Avenue on the Fallowfield Viaduct in Beechview. In rush hour, two-car trains run on all routes except 52. Route 42C will soon be the Red Line, according to the Transit Development Plan
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German Lutheran Cemetery in Beechview
In the nineteenth century, churches usually built their cemeteries outside the city. At the turn of the twentieth, when the rapidly expanding streetcar lines triggered a storm of new development all around Pittsburgh, many of those cemeteries ended up surrounded by crowded urban neighborhoods. This one in Beechview is not quite forgotten; someone comes to mow it two or three times a year, but much of it is so overgrown by now that it’s immune to the mower.
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Streetcars Still Run in Beechview
Many Pittsburghers from between the rivers firmly believe that streetcars are extinct in Pittsburgh. They are indeed extinct between the rivers, except where they run underground in the subway; but south of the Mon they still run on the street in Allentown and Beechview, and on their own right-of-way far out into the southern suburbs.
Above, a Route 42S car rolls outbound up Broadway in Beechview. Below, an inbound car begins its crossing of the viaduct between Fallowfield and Westfield.
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Streetcars Passing in Beechview
Two streetcars pass at the intersection of Beechview Avenue and Broadway. Streetcars of various sorts have run on Broadway for more than a century. This picture was taken a few years ago; these Siemens cars have since been rebuilt and repainted in the new Port Authority livery.
