Once there was a lively little Slovak neighborhood at the north end of the 16th Street Bridge. Today almost nothing remains of it except one crumbling abandoned church (most recently used as a daycare center); the rectory, now divided into apartments; and one substantial building between them, hideously deformed by an addition that must have been designed to express the builder’s seething hatred of beauty and proportion.
As seen across the river, Heinz Field, where the Steelers and the Panthers play, is pleasingly symmetrical. The side facing the river is left open to give the television cameras an occasional view of the skyline.
The Alcoa headquarters on the North Shore, which one might describe as a modernist-revival building.
A beautifully proportioned entrance on North Avenue in the Mexican War Streets. If the picture looks like something from the 1930s, it isn’t. But the camera is. It’s an old Agfa Isolette, using Croatian film whose formula hasn’t changed since this camera was new.
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.
