The Monongahela Incline is getting a thorough going-over. They’re going to fabricate new drive sheaves and replace the gabions, and if you understand what those things mean you probably know a lot about inclines. Here’s something you might like: “Glass flooring will be installed in the Upper Station waiting area that will allow the public to view the inner workings of the Incline.”
Here we see the upper station: note the incline car parked just below the station to empty out the building for the work.
Here is a large institutional building whose story of abandonment and decay has a happy ending.
South Hills High School was Pittsburgh’s second great palace of high-school education, right after Schenley High School. For this one, the city hired Alden & Harlow, arguably the most prestigious institutional architects money could buy. They were responsible for the Carnegie Institute and all the branch libraries, in addition to multiple millionaires’ mansions and skyscrapers downtown.
The site of the school is improbably vertical. In those days, “South Hills” meant the back slopes of Mount Washington, and a walk along the side of this school is a steep climb. But the architects met the challenge with a Tudor Gothic palace that seems to have grown on the site. It takes up a whole city block.
The Ruth Street side of the school opened in 1917; the rest of the school—planned from the beginning—opened in 1925. For many years the school took in students from the South Hills and beyond—“beyond” meaning Banksville, Beechview, and Brookline. In 1976, a monstrously modernist new school—Brashear—opened in Beechview, which took in all the students from the southern neighborhoods. With population declining and the building getting old, the city decided to close South Hills altogether in 1986.
And then it sat and rotted for 23 years.
But, as we said, the story has a happy ending. As you see from these pictures, the building is well taken care of now. In 2010 it reopened as apartments for senior citizens, so that once again it is an ornament to its neighborhood.
Update: Although it is often written that the fan houses were built in response to the near-disaster of the Tubes’ first traffic jam, it turns out that the ventilation system was planned from the beginning, with the fan house and stacks at their current location. Source: The American Contractor, July 14, 1923: “Fan Houses & Stacks: $133,000. 1 sty. 190×110. Liberty Tunnell, cor. Senate [sic, = Secane] & Ruth, Pittsburgh. Archt. A. D. Meeld, 708 Bakewell bldg., Pittsburgh. Owner The Commrs. of Allegheny Co., A. C. Gumbert, Court House, Pittsburgh. Brk. & limestone. Gen. contr. let to Williams & Hass, Empire bldg., Pittsburgh. Htg. & plmg. to United Gas Improvement Co., Broad & Arch sts., Philadelphia, Pa.”
Father Pitt keeps the original article below, but read it with that knowledge in mind.
When the Liberty Tubes opened in 1924, they had no ventilation system. They didn’t need one, the engineers said. Cars whooshing through the tunnels would carry the bad air out with them.
If you have ever driven in the Liberty Tunnels at rush hour, you can probably spot the flaw in that theory.
It did not take long for the flaw to become obvious. On May 10, 1924—when a transit strike was going on—a traffic jam filled the tunnel, and more than forty people passed out and needed medical attention. It was lucky no one died.
The fan house finally went into service in 1928. It has four giant chimneys, two for intake and two for exhaust. They’re a prominent landmark on the back side of Mount Washington, although it can be fiendishly difficult to find one’s way to them in the warren of precipitous streets.
We should note that sources disagree about whether the fan house was part of the original plan. In some tellings (like the Wikipedia article), it was a reaction to the disastrous traffic jam of May 10. In others (like this very interesting feature from WESA), it had been planned all along, but the tunnels were opened well before the ventilation system was completed. Father Pitt has not been able to sort out which version is the real story in the limited time he was willing to devote to research, and he invites anyone with a good source to speak up in the comments. (Update: Father Pitt himself found the good source, and you have seen the results in the update above.)
These houses on Cola Street (and a couple on William Street behind it) are in various styles and come from various eras. But they all either were built or have been adapted for one main purpose: to suck in as much of the magnificent skyline view as possible.
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.
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.
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.
