The South Side Works, an ambitious project to build an entirely new urban neighborhood, naturally needed a neighborhood cinema on the square. And the proper style for a neighborhood cinema is Art Deco, with lots of neon and other noble gases.

On the whole, the South Side Flats were East European and the Slopes were German. But a large neighborhood like the Flats has room for diverse microneighborhoods, and we find this “Schiller’s Bell Singing and Athletic Society” on Jane Street. The building is now turned to other uses, but the inscription remains. Pittsburgh and Allegheny used to be full of German singing societies; the Teutonia Männerchor in Dutchtown is the most prominent remnant.

Rainbows glow as the late-afternoon sun hits a fountain in Bessemer Court, Station Square. Behind the fountain is a Bessemer converter salvaged from a steel mill; behind that is the Monongahela with downtown Pittsburgh on the other side.

A South Side alley, crammed with little houses, in the fading light of a summer evening. In dense neighborhoods like the South Side, alleys were built between the main streets to serve the rear entrances of the rowhouses; but soon the real estate became so valuable that, one by one, the property owners sold off their back yards for smaller rowhouses. Alley houses like these are especially typical of the South Side, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, and the Mexican War Streets, all of them old rowhouse neighborhoods.

Belgian block is a pavement made of brick-shaped stones, more or less uniform, but usually rather less than more. Pittsburghers call it “cobblestone,” having lost the memory of what real cobblestones are like. (A real cobblestone is an irregular smooth, round stone, and cobblestone pavements are quite a bit bumpier than Belgian-block pavements.) Countless Belgian-block pavements still exist in Pittsburgh, and often preparations for repaving an asphalt street reveal the Belgian blocks beneath, still perfectly intact, as they will be when archaeologists dig them up a thousand years from now.

This pavement is on an industrial street near the river on the South Side. Old Pa Pitt admits to not knowing the purpose of what appear to be iron spikes in a more or less straight line.

An inherited camera with fifteen-year-old film took this picture of the front of the South Side Works theater at night. It’s a bit grainy, but recognizable.