Father Pitt

Category: Beechview

  • Beechview Theater

    Beechview Theater

    Some time ago old Pa Pitt took a picture of this silent-era neighborhood movie theater in the middle of its recent renovation. It is pleasing to see it now nicely finished and home to a video-production company. It has had an eventful and oddly circular history. It was built before 1914, since it appears in a 1914 guide to Pittsburgh (which describes Beechview as “beyond the South Hills,” showing how the definition of “South Hills” has moved with the expansion of the suburbs). After some decades as a theater, it was turned into an American Legion post. Then for a while it became a nursing home. Finally it was renovated as you see it now and brought back to its roots in the movie business.

    An update: According to a 1923 map, this was called the Olympic Theater. There were at least three theaters in Beechview in 1923.

  • Hampshire Avenue, Beechview

    Hampshire avenue

    Father Pitt is convinced that the developers who laid out the streets in Beechview had never visited the site. Just draw lines north-south and east-west on a map, and you have your streets. Hills? Oh, they can’t be that bad, can they?

    Here is Hampshire Avenue viewed from the Red Line streetcar crossing, with Broadway—where the Red Line crosses Hampshire again—at the top of the next hill.

  • Streetcar Coming Up Broadway

    Streetcar on Broadway, Beechview

    An outbound Red Line car on Broadway in Beechview passes Hampshire Avenue.

  • War Memorial Park in Beechview

    The little triangular park at Broadway, Shiras Avenue, and Bensonia Avenue is cluttered with monuments. There’s one for the First World War, one for the Second, one for Vietnam and Korea, and one for wars since then and “going forward,” as the city’s Twitter account put it when it was announced. The eagle above sits on the World War II memorial, the largest of the lot.

    The latest memorial, for everything after Vietnam.

    The World War I memorial.

    The World War II memorial.

  • Beechview United Presbyterian Church

    This unassuming little church, like most of the Protestant churches in Beechview, is easy to miss: it sits on the main business street in the middle of the main business district, and it is not much larger than the small storefronts along Broadway. But it seems, if old Pa Pitt’s research is correct, to have been the work of a distinguished architect: Thomas Hannah, who designed the Keenan Building, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral (formerly a Congregational church), and the Western Theological Seminary (now West Hall of the Community College of Allegheny County), along with many other smaller projects like this one.

  • Hampshire Safety Island, Beechview

    The angle is not exaggerated in this photograph: Pittsburgh streetcars really do have to climb absurd grades like this. This is one of the small number of remaining streetcar safety islands in the city. Behind it is a tiny Central American restaurant with a reputation for excellent food; it inhabits a little building in the Spanish Mission style, which seems appropriate.

  • Beechview Community Center

    A commercial building like a thousand others in the city, but nicely restored, with attractively varied brickwork and a subtle polychrome scheme to pick out the details of the trim. Because old Pa Pitt happened to be out for a walk in the neighborhood, we get to see it from all angles.

    Addendum: The building was put up in about 1911, and the architect was the extremely local William J. Gray,1 whose address was almost directly across the street. When this building was finished, however, Gray moved his office into it.

    In most cities you can ask how many floors a building is and get a reasonable answer. In Pittsburgh, that’s a complicated question.

    A 1930 picture of the building shows the upper floor being used for pool, bowling, and basketball.

    1. Source: “New Business Block in Beechview,” Pittsburg Press, December 4, 1910. ↩︎

  • Red Line Car Stopping at Hampshire

    A friend from Beechview was complaining that no one believes streetcars still run in Pittsburgh. Pittsburghers from between the rivers know there’s a subway, but they seem entirely unaware that the subway fans out into various lines that meander through the city neighborhoods south of the Monongahela and far out into the South Hills. The next time you run into a doubter, you may offer this photographic proof that streetcars (as people in Beechview still call them) still run on the street in Pittsburgh. This is a Red Line car stopping at the outbound Hampshire stop in Beechview, and then continuing around the bend past the Beechview Community Center.

  • Seldom Seen Arch

    The Wabash Railroad built this picturesque structure to carry its line over Saw Mill Run and the little lane that led back into the village of Seldom Seen.

  • Archaeology in Saw Mill Run

    Like many streams in the city, Saw Mill Run is full of debris. But it is very interesting debris. If you enlarge the picture, you can see bricks of multiple types, bits of glass, broken plates, and other evidence of the long-vanished village of Shalerville. For the urban archaeologist, Seldom Seen is a rich treasury.