Garden Way, looking eastward toward Children’s Hospital.
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Alley in Lawrenceville
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J. K. Wymard Sidewalk Plaque, Lawrenceville
J. K. WYMARD PAVING PITTSBURG How old is your sidewalk? Quite possibly more than a century old. The spelling “Pittsburg” was federally official between 1891 and 1911, and though some institutions continued to use the shorter form after the spelling officially reverted to “Pittsburgh,” the lettering on this bronze plaque is very much a nineteenth-century style. The Pittsburgh Orbit site featured this plaque a few years ago in its roundup of sidewalk plaques; the editor there is of the opinion that the sidewalk could not be more than a century old, but old Pa Pitt is of the opinion that well-laid concrete is forever. Especially if you repair the segments that crumble too much.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Front Porches on Main Street, Lawrenceville
An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.
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43rd Street Presbyterian Church, Lawrenceville
Built in 1883, this church now belongs to the New Bethel Baptist Church. It is typical of its era, but unusual in preserving its octagonal steeple.
For some reason these pictures got lost in the piles of photographs old Pa Pitt is always stacking up here and there. They were taken in September of 2022.
Perhaps Father Pitt held off on publishing these pictures because he was debating whether he should do something about that jungle of utility cables. The cables won that debate.
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Penn Avenue Gatehouse, Allegheny Cemtery
If you are not a frequent visitor to Allegheny Cemetery, you might pass the Penn Avenue gatehouse and wonder whether your memory is playing tricks on you. Isn’t there something…different about it?
Your memory is not playing tricks on you. Here is a picture from 2021:
What old Pa Pitt was told was that engineers had determined that the tower was dangerously unstable. The stones were carefully taken apart and labeled, and maybe someday the tower will be restored.
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Italianate Commercial Building, Lawrenceville
An unusually attractive building on Butler Street at the corner of Main Street. Note the folk-art wood carving in the trim.
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Mellon Bank, Lawrenceville
In the 1960s, Mellon Bank built a number of modernist bank branches that reinterpreted traditional bank architecture in modern forms. Here the classical colonnade is simplified to a schematic.
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Woolslair Public School, Bloomfield/Lawrenceville
This fine Renaissance palace, built in 1897, was designed by Samuel T. McClaren. It sits on 40th Street at Liberty Avenue, where it is technically—according to city planning maps—in Bloomfield. Most Pittsburghers, however, would probably call this section of Bloomfield “Lawrenceville,” since it sticks like a thumb into lower Lawrenceville, and the Lawrenceville line runs along two edges of the school’s lot.
For some reason the style of this building is listed as “Romanesque revival” wherever we find it mentioned on line. Old Pa Pitt will leave it up to his readers: is this building, with its egg-and-dart decorations, false balconies, and Trajanesque inscriptions, anything other than a Victorian interpretation of a Renaissance interpretation of classical architecture? Now, if you had said “Rundbogenstil,” Father Pitt might have accepted it, because he likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”
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Arsenal Bank Building
We saw the 1884 Arsenal Bank earlier from across Butler Street. Here is the 43rd Street side of the building, which we can see clearly thanks to the disappearance years ago of the neighboring buildings.
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Swedish Congregational Church, Lawrenceville
There is something about men’s clubs: when they take over a building, the first thing they do is block out as much of the natural light as possible. But the outlines of the old windows are clear enough: it is not hard to imagine this building the way it was when it was a Swedish church.
This is a late example of the style of modest church more typical of the middle 1800s. It has all the elements—the shallow-pitched roof, the walls divided into sections by simple pilasters, the date stone in the gable, the crenellations. We also note that typical nineteenth-century Pittsburgh adaptation to a tiny lot: the sanctuary is on the second floor, with social hall and schoolrooms or offices on the ground floor.
Without the date stone, old Pa Pitt would have guessed that this church was twenty years or more earlier.
The Amvets seem to have moved out, and it looks as if the building is vacant now. Considering the mushrooming value of Lawrenceville real estate, it will probably be filled or demolished soon.
