The Mexican War Streets are mostly flat, but at the back end they start to creep up the hill toward Perry Hilltop. This beautiful block of rowhouses is just about perfect: the street paved with Belgian block, the houses well taken care of but not ostentatiously overrestored, and filled with friendly neighbors.
Brick sidewalks have their own charm, and they become more charming as they age and grow more difficult to walk on.
The trees in the old arboretum are leafing out, the cherries and the violets are blooming, and the ducks in Lake Elizabeth are fat and happy.
Manchester is a relatively poor neighborhood rich in Victorian architecture. Nowhere else in Pittsburgh are there so many uninterrupted blocks of Victorian rowhouses with elaborate front porches. The restoration of the neighborhood was a pet project of Richard Mellon Scaife, the eccentric billionaire owner of the Tribune-Review.
A headless statue accumulated from somewhere, now standing up to its neck in Boston ivy outside the Mattress Factory art museum.
Father Suitbert Mollinger was the greatest collector of holy relics in history, and his collection (the largest in the world outside the Vatican) still lives in the chapel he built on Troy Hill to accommodate it. But Father Mollinger was more than a priest and a collector: he was also a healer. He had a reputation for miraculous cures. He also had medical training, which gave him an edge on the competition in the miracle-cures department. And even six months after his death, as we see here, he was still in the patent-medicine business.
This advertisement comes from the Volksblatt, one of three German dailies in Pittsburgh in 1892. The text advertises Father Mollinger’s original-recipe cures for catarrh, rheumatism, and other common diseases, which are to be had from a druggist on Federal Street in Allegheny (now the North Side). You know they’re authentic because no one could forge that beard.
If the addresses have not changed, this druggist was in the block of Federal Street where PNC Park is now.
H. H. Richardson’s courthouse started a fad for “Richardsonian Romanesque” architecture in Pittsburgh, in private homes as well as in public buildings. Here’s a well-preserved corner house in Manchester.
The courtyard of the Penn Brewery in Dutchtown at the base of Troy Hill. This was the old Eberhardt and Ober brewery; the building is still the same, but the beer is now some of the best in the world. The restaurant serves some of the best German food in Pittsburgh.
The sidewalk of Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West. A hundred years ago, this neighborhood had more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else on earth.
Calvary Methodist Church in Allegheny West is famous for its Tiffany windows, some of the greatest works of the Tiffany studios. Even if it didn’t have those windows, though, it might still be famous for this doorway.
The skyline of downtown Pittsburgh seen from West Park. The bare branches, jagged buildings, and high contrast of a cloudy winter day make the picture, taken with an old and slightly leaky folding camera, look like a steel engraving.
