Category: South Side

  • Pittsburgh Foundry Office, South Side

    Pittsburgh Foundry office

    This tidy little building in the back streets of the near South Side was built as the office for the Pittsburgh Foundry plant. The style brings a bit of Arts-and-Crafts to the usual industrial Romanesque. Note the patterned bricks.

    Corner view
    HDR images from a Kodak EasyShare Z1285 set to bracket three exposures at intervals of 1 EV.
  • Ripley & Co. Glass Works, South Side

    Ripley & Co. Glass Works

    The best preserved of the old factories on the South Side, this was acquired, soon after the large corner building was built, by the United States Glass Co. It now belongs to the Salvation Army, which has kept the exterior beautifully.

    Round oriel
    Entrance
    Entrance decorations
    Terra cotta
    Over the entrance (blank inscription)

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Front Door on Sarah Street

    Front door on Sarah Street
    Woodwork
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • Doorbell Buttons

    Pair of doorbell buttons

    A pair of old doorbell buttons on a house on the South Side. They have little windows where the name of the occupant to be summoned could be displayed. The similar button on the front door of the Pitt mansion is connected by a wire to an electrically activated clapper in the basement, which beats against a bell after the manner of an alarm clock as long as the button is pressed. This is enough racket to be heard throughout a large house. One does have to warn guests about it, though; otherwise the first political canvasser who shows up will send them running for the exits thinking the fire alarm has gone off.

  • Aluminum Awnings on the South Side

    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh

    Awnings used to be a big business in Pittsburgh. The awning men would come to your house in the spring and put canvas awnings over your doors and windows for summer shade, and then in the fall they would come around and take down the awnings and take them away to be cleaned and put in storage, and then in the spring you would get fresh awnings again. (You can still find one or two services that will do that for you.)

    Obviously you have to spend some money on this service, and that limited it largely to the upper middle classes and above. When someone had the brilliant idea of making awnings out of cheap aluminum, however, the floodgates were opened, and every working-class house could at least have a little awning over its front door to shelter the residents while they fumbled for their keys in the rain.

    Frame houses on South 24th Street on the South Side, Pittsburgh

    On some streets—as here on 24th Street—you can still pass one aluminum awning after another, often a bit bedraggled but still clinging to its house.

    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh
    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh

    These awnings were made by a number of different manufacturers, and they came in a wide variety of shapes.

    Front door of a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh
    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh

    Aluminum awnings were supposedly open to the objection that, when the sun was beating on them, they created a pocket of hot air under them. (How much of a worry this really is old Pa Pitt could not tell you, but it sounded plausible in the mouth of a salesman.) The problem was supposedly solved, however, by the ingenuity of the Kool Vent Metal Awning Corp. of America,1 which invented and patented diagonal louvers on the sides of the awning that were supposed to allow the hot air to escape from under the awning—an invention described thus:

    An awning adapted to be fastened to a wall or the like support, including a curtain comprising a series of spaced overlapping parallel vertical depending plates, angling outwardly from the awning toward the wall at not more than ninety degrees.

    Front door of a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh
    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh
    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh

    Here we see the diagonal arrangement, designed so that the “vertical depending plates” still provide reasonable shelter from blowing rain but allow air to escape between them. Other awning companies imitated this arrangement, but Kool Vent successfully sued them, enforced its patent, and became the king of the aluminum-awning companies.

    Aluminum awning on a house on the South Side, Pittsburgh

    The architectural historian Franklin Toker facetiously suggested that the South Side should be declared a Kool Vent Awning historic district, and although other neighborhoods—Bloomfield, for example, and South Oakland—also have large Kool Vent infestations, the South Side probably preserves Kool Vent awnings and their competitors in greater numbers and density than any other neighborhood. All the awnings in this article were found in one block of South 24th Street.

    1. At various times the name seems to have been spelled Kool-Vent and Koolvent as well; here we adopt the spelling used in court documents. ↩︎
  • Victorian Commercial Building on Sarah Street, South Side

    2616 Sarah Street

    Formerly a storefront with apartments above, but the storefront—as with many backstreet stores—has been converted to another apartment. The well-preserved Victorian details are picked out with a colorful but tasteful paint scheme.

    Lintel
    Dentils and diamond
    Cornice
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.
  • St. Michael School, South Side

    St. Matthew School

    This little Slovak school, which opened in 1917, was designed by German-American architect Herman Lang, known for some splendid churches (notably St. George’s in Allentown and St. Basil’s in Carrick). He gave it a dignified and symmetrical façade that no one will ever see like this, because it faces a tiny narrow alley with room for one car to squeeze past the buildings on either side. It is impossible to photograph the school without resorting to trickery, but old Pa Pitt has never been above trickery. You will notice the seams if you enlarge this picture, but that is because this is one of the most impossible photographs Father Pitt has ever attempted.

    The building is in good shape, having been turned into apartments, like almost every other school on the South Side.

    Cornerstone

    The cornerstone was laid in 1916.

    Cornerstone
  • Larkins Way, South Side

    Larkins Way

    It is impossible to resist taking pictures of these narrow South Side alleys. Fortunately, with digital photography, a photograph is within a mill or two of free, so there is no reason to resist the temptation.

  • 33rd Street Tunnel, South Side

    To the south, at the base of the steep South Side Slopes, was a small but crowded neighborhood of workmen and their families. To the north was a huge steel mill, a railroad roundhouse and shops, and a big brewery. In between was a railroad yard with more than twenty tracks to cross. How would the workmen get to work without getting run over by switching locomotives every day? The answer was to extend 33rd Street from the Slopes to the Flats as a pedestrian tunnel under the main line, followed by a long pedestrian bridge over the railroad yards.

    Hopkins real-estate plat map from 1923, showing the 33rd Street bridge and tunnel.

    The bridge and the railroad yard are gone now; the tunnel remains, but since it goes nowhere it is blocked. The tunnel entrance is still attractive in its stony simplicity.

  • Stairs into the Grand Concourse

    Stairway down to the Grand Concourse

    The stairway from the Smithfield Street Bridge down into the Grand Concourse of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad station.