Looking east from 22nd Street.
It is a peculiarity of Pittsburgh that the city has no alleys. Of course this is not true in any meaningful sense, except one: that no alley is officially called an alley on planning maps. They are usually called “Way,” or sometimes “Street,” and one or two are probably “Avenues.”
However, there was a time when Pittsburgh dared to call an alley an alley, as we can see from the old Larkins Alley sign on the back of St. Casimir’s Church.
The Duquesne Brewery mushroomed into a titanic operation after the Second World War, and then rapidly collapsed in the 1960s and was gone by the 1970s. At its peak it took up three blocks on the South Side, and of course it was famous for the largest clock in the world. This 1899 building, the center of the empire, was abandoned for some time, then taken over by artist squatters, and finally, as the Brew House, became lofts and studios. It is an architectural curiosity, added to over the course of the brewery’s history with some regard for consistent style but no regard at all for symmetry.
This splendid apartment block in Oakland occupies an awkward plot. The intersection is not precisely perpendicular, which means the plot is not precisely rectangular. The architect has attacked this problem by making a staggered façade along Craig Street, skillfully manipulating the ornamentation so that it appears to be more symmetrical than it is. In this picture, the ground floor—given over to retail shops—is being renovated.
In the days before suburban shopping centers, every block of a city neighborhood would have its backstreet grocery store. Many of these old stores have been converted to apartments, but you can still recognize them easily. They’re often on a corner, and the ground floor in front is distinctly different, usually distinguished by space for a sign along the top of the ground-floor façade, sometimes with the shop windows filled in with siding or other later accretions. Here are two typical examples from the South Side.
One of Alden and Harlow’s distinguished designs for small libraries, this one has changed very little externally since it opened.
Some typically elegant Victorian brick houses on Sidney Street between 23rd and 24th.
Side-by-side duplexes are often built to give the impression of a single elegant house; but over the years, separate ownership can destroy the illusion, as it has done in the left-hand pair, where one half has been modernized without regard to the appearance of the whole.
In the old days, every block in a dense rowhouse neighborhood like the South Side had its backstreet grocery and its backstreet bar. Most of the groceries are gone, but a surprising number of the bars survive. Above, Cupka’s Cafe, which has become well known for food as well. Below, Karwoski’s Tavern, which is mostly for drinking and not much for eating.
Decorative trim on the Schiller Glocke Gesang und Turn Verein (map), a German singing club (now apartments) built in 1897.
