The curiously angular Gothic of this 1881 church might have pleased a congregation that wanted a building that looked like a church, but not one that looked too medieval. Like many other churches in the most crowded Pittsburgh neighborhoods (including several on the South Side), it adapts to its tiny lot by placing the sanctuary on the second floor, leaving the ground floor for Sunday-school rooms and social halls.
The famous Victorian front doors of the South Side are featured on posters and in picture books on coffee tables all over western Pennsylvania. There is an endless variety to the woodwork on these South Side rowhouses. Old Pa Pitt was out walking on the South Side and decided to concentrate on doors: here is the collection he made in just half an hour’s stroll. Click on any picture to enlarge it.
Many of these doorways have decorative stained-glass transoms over the door, often with the address worked into the glass:
Of course, no collection of South Side front doors would be complete without a Kool Vent awning on an alley house:
Carson Street is the commercial spine of the South Side, but occasionally we run across a house left over from the time before Carson was almost exclusively commercial. Most of them have small offices on the ground floors now, but they retain their domestic external appearance. This house strikes Father Pitt as a halfway point between Second Empire and Italianate styles in local rowhouses; it’s notable for its prickly decorative ironwork on the roof.
The Maul Building at Carson and Seventeenth is noted for its ornate terra-cotta exterior. Unfortunately the cornice has been lost, but the rest of the building, which dates from 1910, is still one of Carson Street’s commercial treasures.
Built in 1854, this is one of several churches in Pittsburgh that solved the problem of tiny lots in crowded neighborhoods by putting the sanctuary on the second floor, leaving the first floor for social halls, Sunday-school rooms, and the like.
This building at the corner of Carson and 17th, known to today’s Pittsburghers as the home of Nakama, a well-known Japanese restaurant, was once Lorch’s, the “South Side’s Big Store,” as we can see in this advertisement preserved by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation:
To run a department store on the South Side in about 1901, you had to be able to serve your customers in Polish—and probably Ukrainian and Serbian and several other languages as well.
This is a lot of bridge for its location. It was originally meant to carry an expressway that would connect Oakland with the South Hills, merrily destroying huge tracts of city along the way. Fortunately this is the only part of it that was built. In the picture below you can see, in the lower right corner, the stub of an entrance ramp that was never completed.
Alden and Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects, designed this branch library, as they did many others. This one opened in 1909.
For years this building has been hidden behind a garish modernist façade. Renovation work shows us a modest mid-nineteenth-century building typical of old Birmingham, the narrow-streeted section of the South Side up to 17th Street.
Update: The building has been restored to something more like its original appearance.
The old St. Joseph’s Hospital became Carson Towers, a senior citizens’ apartment building, in 1977. But the central part is the original hospital building from 1911 (or 1907, depending on the source you read), preserving the original inscription. An article in the City Paper explains some of the history. This PDF has a picture of the original building. The caption says that “The sculpture over the front door is the only part of the original façade still visible on the building that is now Carson Towers,” but the most superficial comparison will show that this entire central section is virtually unchanged, except for more modern windows too small to fit the old frames.
