Another moving still picture, this one of sunset light on steam rising from a chimney in Beechview.
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Chimney at Sunset
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The View from Beechview
Little glimpses of the downtown skyline pop up unexpectedly in hilltop neighborhoods. Here, from a back street in Beechview, we see Mount Washington, with the U. S. Steel Tower and the BNY Mellon Center poking their heads up behind the hill.
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Sunset Over Beechview
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Magnolias
It’s a magnificent early spring, and the magnolias are already in bloom. This tree was in full flower beside Fallowfield Avenue in Beechview.
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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.
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Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus)
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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Stained Glass in Beechview
The Good Shepherd window at the rear of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Beechview Avenue, Beechview. The church building is a century old this year.
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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
A street in Beechview after the blizzard. Often the only way to dig out your car is to bury your neighbor’s car. Your neighbor then buries his neighbor’s car, and so on down the street.
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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.
