Father Pitt

Category: South Side

  • Morse School

    Now part of the Morse Gardens apartments, this fine-looking 1874 school was designed by T. D. Evans, about whom old Pa Pitt knows nothing else. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

  • Terra-Cotta Head

    This terra-cotta head of a helmeted allegorical figure (the flowing hair suggests femininity, but the armor suggests “don’t mess with me”) is really a first-rate piece of work, which makes it all the more surprising to find it built into the gable of a rowhouse on the South Side. It is the sort of ornament you add to tell your neighbors, “I am slightly more prosperous than you, because I can afford to have this built into my gable.”

    —Old Pa Pitt suspects that this is meant to be a head of Minerva, a Roman goddess you don’t mess with.

    The other decorative details on this house are also fine, though more in a vernacular Victorian Romanesque style. This ornament is in the arch above the middle second-floor window.

  • Christmas at the SouthSide Works

    The Town Square at the SouthSide Works, decorated for Christmas. The SouthSide Works Cinema is a good imitation of an Art Deco neighborhood movie house, though the Deco entrance leads to a modern multiplex.

  • More Breezeways of the South Side

    You might have thought one dose of breezeways would have been enough for such an esoteric subject, but you would have been mistaken. With his usual monomania, Father Pitt is building up a large collection of South Side breezeways, with plans to expand the collection into other neighborhoods soon.

    Sometimes curious accidents happen to breezeways. For example:

    This appears to be half a breezeway: the house on the left has been much altered, with its half of the shared breezeway filled in.

    Here is a shared breezeway that has lost one of its houses, so that it has now become a curious lean-to construction on the side of the remaining house.

  • Carved Brackets

    Carved brackets over the front door of a Victorian rowhouse on the South Side.

  • Fall on Sarah Street

    Fall colors persist far into November in the city, though the trees in the suburbs are mostly naked twigs by now.

  • Patterns in the Bricks

    Shadows highlight the unusually intricate brickwork on the Schiller Glocke Gesang und Turn Verein, South Side.


    Map

  • Autumn on the South Side

    Fall colors on the sidewalk of Jane Street.

  • Kosciusko Way, South Side Slopes

    Kosciusko Way, apparently named for the famous Polish hero of the Revolutionary War, is a narrow and crowded street that makes a brave attempt to go straight up from Josephine Street into the South Side Slopes, but makes it only a block before being utterly defeated by topography.

    Map

  • Breezeways of the South Side

    This is certainly one of old Pa Pitt’s most esoteric subjects. In rowhouse neighborhoods, there are often tunnel-like passages through to the rear yard of a house, with the upper storeys built over the passage. These outdoor passages are called “breezeways” in Pittsburgh; in other cities they may be called gangways or alleys. Sometimes the passage runs through one house; sometimes it is shared by two houses. We see examples of both in this little collection.