Category: Mount Washington

  • Urban Archaeology: The Hotel Henry

    Fragment of a plate from 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:

  • 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.

  • 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.


    Map

  • 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.

  • 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.


    Map

  • 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.

  • The Skyline on a Grey December Day

  • Dolphin Fountain, Grandview Park

    A dolphin fountain at the Grandview Park entrance where Bailey Avenue turns into Beltzhoover Avenue. Since this picture was taken in 2001, the stones have been cleaned of their decades of industrial soot.


    Map

  • Grandview Avenue

    A stroll along Grandview Avenue, Mount Washington, on a sunny day in early fall.

  • Seldom Seen Arch

    This fine arched tunnel, stone faced with a brick interior, was built as part of the great Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway boondoggle, one of the boondoggliest boondoggles in a city known for boondoggles.

    Just off Saw Mill Run Boulevard is a little parking lot. You have to look for it: it’s on the turnoff to Woodruff Street, and it’s almost invisible till you’re right there. From there you can reach the arch, which is well worth a visit for its own sake. The interior in particular is more interesting than interiors of tunnels usually are. The engineers had fun with this one.

    If you walk through the tunnel into the green world beyond, you’ll find that you’re walking on a broad path of gravel and occasional asphalt. This was Watkins Lane, the only way into a little farm village called Seldom Seen, or Shalerville before that. Like a surprising number of isolated bits of the city of Pittsburgh, it remained a farming village, with farming, even into the twentieth century. It was abandoned by some time in the 1960s, and the forest has reclaimed it. We’ll see more of Seldom Seen in the future.

    Stream valleys in the Pittsburgh area are valuable as being the only nearly level routes through the landscape, and you will never find a major stream valley without railroad tracks in it. But as we can see here, the Saw Mill Run valley has had three railroads in it at once, one of which is still active.

    In the spring Saw Mill Run is often a raging torrent, but it is much more placid in the summer.