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.
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Seldom Seen Arch
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Monongahela Incline, Upper Station
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Spring on the Back Slopes of Mount Washington
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Seldom Seen Arch in an Artsy Way
This was an attempt to make a modern digital photo look like a nineteenth-century art photograph. Note the rock climbers preparing to climb the stone wall.
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Urban Archaeology: The Hotel Henry
One never knows what may turn up at an old homesite. The Seldom Seen Greenway on the border of Beechview and Mount Washington is forest now, with Saw Mill Run gushing merrily through it. But Seldom Seen was a little village of its own once, and the old homesites are full of broken plates and bottles and other items of intense archaeological interest. Here is a plate from the Hotel Henry, once a grand hotel on Fifth Avenue, but torn down in the 1950s to make way for a modernist skyscraper. Was it bought or stolen from the hotel? We’ll never know.
The Historic Pittsburgh site has a good picture of the Hotel Henry as it appeared in about 1900.
Do you need a copy of the hotel’s logo in scalable form? Probably not, but old Pa Pitt has reconstructed it for you anyway:
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Reflections in the Seldom Seen Arch
Hypnotic patterns of sunlight reflected from the pool in Saw Mill Run on the bricks of the Seldom Seen Arch. Go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page to see the video in glorious HD-ish.
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A Street on Mount Washington
Like many hilltop neighborhoods, Mount Washington is full of streets that appear as streets on maps but turn out to be stairways. They made driving perilous in the early days of GPS navigation, but most navigation systems have learned to distinguish the stairways by now. Mann Street is three blocks long, and two of the three are stairways like this.
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Waterfall, Mount Washington
This lovely waterfall plunges down the hill right beside Woodruff Street on Mount Washington. It’s nearly invisible until you’re almost right beside it, and many drivers probably never notice it.
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Urban Archaeology in Emerald View Park
Emerald View Park is a catch-all name for a string of parks ringing Mount Washington. In the section off Greenleaf Street are many remnants of at least one old house and some other constructions. Since old plat maps show nothing precisely here, this may have been dumped debris from a demolition nearby. Now the forest is taking over, but sections of brick wall and tile floor make surreal additions to the woodland scene.
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Grandview Avenue, Duquesne Heights
Duquesne Heights is the western section of Mount Washington, the part that includes the expensive restaurants overlooking the skyline and the luxury apartment towers. Here we see Grandview Pointe in the foreground, with its glass-walled elevator shaft leading up to the Monterey Bay Fish Grotto, and the Trimont in the distance.
