Father Pitt

Category: South Side

  • Hollywood-on-the-Mon

    Location shooting can happen anywhere. Wherever you see a sign with three initials and an arrow, you can follow it to a movie shooting on location. (You can identify the location by the fleets of Haddad’s trucks parked nearby.) Sometimes, however, the signs are more specific, especially when parking is involved.

  • Duquesne Brewery

    In the late 1970s, artists began to take over the vacant Duquesne Brewery. Now (after many battles over ownership) it has been renovated as artists’ lofts and studios.

  • Carved Stoop on the South Side

    Doors and doorframes often have elaborate carvings on the South Side, but not many stoops have elaborate decorations like these, either carved or stamped into the concrete.

  • Tunnel Park

    Tunnel Park is a strip of green on the river side of the SouthSide Works development. The name comes from the fact that there is a railroad tunnel beneath the green. And here is the entrance to the tunnel, which is not very picturesque but is something of a curiosity.

  • 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.