Father Pitt

Category: South Side

  • More Front Doors of the South Side

    Front door

    Another small celebration of the varieties of woodwork to be found on South Side houses.

    This is also a front door
    Another front door
    Now here we have a front door
    It looks like a front door to me
    Probably a front door
    If we had to guess, we should say this was a front door
    A very modest front door
    King Charles IV of Spain, cunningly disguised as a front door
    A front door

  • Second Empire Building at 19th and Jane Streets, South Side

    Second Empire building

    According to old maps, this building was put up in the 1880s. It is typical of the Second Empire style as it trickled down to smaller buildings. Most of it is relatively plain, but note the elaborate brickwork of the chimneys. The dormers may be simplified replacements of the originals, but they harmonize well with the style of the building. Currently the building seems to have four apartments, but it may have been a private house. It is not large, but it stands on a block of much smaller frame houses and thus looks bigger than it is.

    Jane Street side
    19th Street front

  • Chimney Pots of the South Side

    Chimney pots

    You probably thought old Pa Pitt had reached the frozen limit of esoteric obsession when he brought you large collections of breezeways. You were mistaken. With the long lens on his Fuji HS10 camera, he is able to pick out clear pictures of chimney pots, and he has always been fascinated by chimney pots. They are still found on some of the oldest houses in the neighborhood, and they come in a wonderful variety of shapes and decorations. Expect to see many more pictures of chimney pots, but these are a good start.

    More chimney pots
    These are also chimney pots
    You probably guessed that these were chimney pots, too
    Would you believe us if we told you these were chimney pots?
    At least this picture has a satellite dish for variety, but, yeah, more chimney pots
    Oh, look! Chimney pots!
    George Washington Carver playing a xylophone. Just kidding! More chimney pots.

  • Birmingham Turnverein (Lithuanian Hall)

    This building is an epitome of the history of the South Side. The first wave of immigrants after the original English and Scotch-Irish settlers was the Germans. There was a Turnhalle, a German athletic club, on this site by 1872, and probably well before; it was across the street from a German Evangelical church. That original Birmingham Turnverein was a frame building, but this splendid brick structure was put up some time a little before 1910. (If you enlarge the picture, you can see a pair of “BTV” monograms on the façade near the entrance.) Then came the influx of East Europeans, and many of the Germans moved out. This became a Lithuanian Hall; the German church across the street was demolished and replaced with a Ruthenian Catholic church. In the twenty-first century, we have all become antisocial, and clubs and churches have died; the building has been turned into apartments, as many similar buildings have been.

  • Sunset Reflected

    Sunset reflected in the windows of the Solof Building, South Side.

  • Chimney Pots and Moon

  • South Side, Bluff, and Lower Hill

    A view from the South Side Slopes. Below, a closer look at part of Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital on the Bluff.

  • Stairway to the Slopes

    This stairway at the end of 15th Street, South Side, takes pedestrians up to a bridge over the railroad, and then to a stairway up into the South Side Slopes.

  • Alley House

    A charming little house in an out-of-the-way alley on the South Side.

  • Arched Window in the B. M. Kramer & Co. Building

    Arched window

    The double arch inside a single arch, with a circle to fill in the gap, is characteristic of the style of classically influenced Romanesque the Germans called Rundbogenstil, the round-arch style. It may not be exclusive to the Rundbogenstil, but Father Pitt likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.” The B. M. Kramer and Co. building on the South Side, built as a beer warehouse, is one of the masterpieces of industrial architecture in Pittsburgh.