A streetcar stop in a quiet residential neighborhood of Pittsburgh after dark.
-
Beechview at Night
-
Fallowfield Station and Viaduct, Beechview
The Fallowfield station on the Red Line in Beechview is a kind of parasite on the Fallowfield viaduct. The Fallowfield Avenue end is at street level; the other end of the station is about five storeys above street level. Stations on the Red Line are currently getting a little bit of renovation.
The Fallowfield viaduct is one of three major viaducts, along with a bridge and a tunnel, that are necessary to bring the streetcars from downtown into central Beechview.
The viaduct is as important to pedestrians as it is to streetcars—so important, in fact, that, when the walkway was closed for repairs for a while a few years ago, the Port Authority gave free rides between Fallowfield and Westfield at the other end of the viaduct.
Outbound streetcars approach the viaduct from a curve.
-
Lee School, Beechview
A small school by a distinguished architect: Charles M. Bartberger, who gave us several fine schools. (He is often confused with his father, Charles F. Bartberger, who designed some prominent churches.) The Lee School is now a retirement home under the name Gualtieri Manor.
The entrance is surrounded by tasteful terra-cotta ornamentation.
This pattern is called a Vitruvian wave, named for Vitruvius, the ancient Roman author whose manual on architecture became the arbiter of everything that was proper in design during the Renaissance.
The arms of the city of Pittsburgh over the entrance.
-
Domestic Stained Glass in Beechview
A stained-glass window in an early-twentieth-century house in Beechview. Stained glass like this was especially popular between about 1890 and 1920, just when the streetcar suburbs that later became city neighborhoods were mushrooming. These windows are often stolen if the house is vacant for a while, but even so thousands still decorate houses all around the city.
-
Beechwood School, Beechview
In an out-of-the-way corner of Beechview is this particularly fine school by Press Dowler. The original part of the school was built in 1908 in the borough of West Liberty, because the line between the boroughs of Beechview and West Liberty ran right across the street grid of the developed section of Beechview. “Beechwood” was the name of the original community that became the borough of Beechview, and the company that developed the land on both sides of the border was the Beechwood Improvement Co. In 1909 the two boroughs were both annexed by Pittsburgh, and by 1922 the school was bursting at the seams. Press C. Dowler was hired to design an expansion that more than tripled the size of the school, and he came through with a magnificently ornamented building in the Tudor Gothic style that was all the rage for schools in the 1920s. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural merit.
The name and date inscribed over one of the entrances.
The south section is the original 1908 school, but Mr. Dowler completely rebuilt the façade to match his plan for the expanded school, so that today the whole building appears to have been put up at once.
Mr. Dowler did not stint on terra-cotta decoration.
The lamp of learning.
These urns flank the entrances; old Pa Pitt suspects they were designed by the architect himself.
As a bonus for his loyal readers, old Pa Pitt includes a typically Pittsburghish cacophony of utility cables.
-
Boylan Building, Beechview
The Boylan was one of Beechview’s first commercial buildings—storefronts on the ground floor, apartments above. Over the years it has had some alterations: the front bays have been shrouded in aluminum, the right-hand storefront was filled in by a contractor with more ambition than taste, and it may have lost a cornice. But the current owner has given us a good lesson in how to refresh a building with that kind of history without spending a lot of money. Fresh paint tastefully applied to pick out the details makes the building look inviting and minimizes the aesthetic damage of the altered storefront.
-
Corner Store in Beechview
Pittsburgh neighborhoods used to be full of little corner groceries. Most disappeared when big chain supermarkets took over the grocery trade. But occasionally a neighborhood store succeeds; this one in Beechview moved into a storefront that was vacant for some time and seems to be making a go of it.
Of course it used to be that your average corner grocery was only four or five steps from a streetcar line. That is no longer true in most places, but it is still true in Beechview.
-
View Through the Seldom Seen Arch
Looking toward Saw Mill Run Boulevard.
-
Commercial Building in Beechview
This building sits at the complicated corner where Broadway, Hampshire Avenue, and Beechview Avenue come together. Except for the ground floor in the front, it has changed little since it was put up as one of the first commercial buildings in the neighborhood. For many years the fondly remembered Johns’ Drugs (the apostrophe could have gone either way, since the founder was John A. Johns) was here.
We mentioned “the ground floor in the front” because, like many Beechview buildings, this has ground floors on more than one level. On the Hampshire Avenue side is a little speakeasy in what would be the basement level if the ground were flat.
The street sign with “Hampshire St” is anomalous. The street is called “Hampshire Ave” on other signs, including the one across Broadway. Most streets are “avenues” in Beechview, even if the “avenue” is a concrete stairway.
-
Community of Christ, Beechview
A fine example of the modest Arts-and-Crafts interpretation of Gothic that was fashionable for small churches in the early twentieth century. The building has hardly changed at all since it was put up in 1921, and it is still in use by the congregation that built it. The Community of Christ was formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; it is a fairly liberal church that accepts but does not insist on the Book of Mormon as scripture and otherwise gets along better with mainstream Protestant denominations than it does with the much larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which accounts for about 98% of Mormons.
Addendum: The architects were Carlisle & Sharrer, productive architects of small and medium-sized churches and houses for the upper middle classes.1
- Source: The Construction Record, April 22, 1911: “Architects Carlisle & Sharrer, Jenkins Arcade building, have plans in progress for a one-story brick veneered church, to be erected at Beechview, for the Latter Day Saints’ Congregation. Cost $10,000.” ↩︎
