The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie could not quite get a foothold downtown, but it had the next best thing: a station right on the Smithfield Street Bridge, so that it was only a short walk from downtown to the P&LE trains—or a short trolley ride, since the streetcars ran on the bridge.
The entrance to the station was right at bridge level, with a grand staircase down into the grand concourse.
The Monongahela Incline on a rainy day. The incline opened in 1870, but the ornate lower station was built in 1904; it was designed by MacClure & Spahr.
A street of Georgian rowhouses, all in identical red brick, is a beautiful sight. But there is something jazzy and invigorating about the endless variety of textures in the back streets of the South Side, even if individually some of the artificial sidings people applied to their houses in the twentieth century were never very attractive. The textures are probably best appreciated in black and white, so old Pa Pitt stuck some monochromatic film in his Retinette and went for a walk around the block.
A row of houses in different styles, all of them typical of the South Side.
We’ve seen these two tiny frame houses before. They date from the Civil War era, and unlike almost all the others of their type and age on the South Side they retain their wood siding. The one on the left is an odd shape: there is a kink in the South Side street grid at 24th street, so the alley does not meet the street at a right angle.
This eclectic Victorian has a large dormer on the fourth floor, and another thing that is sort of a dormer, but not exactly, projecting from the roof and lining up with a slightly extended section, giving the house the effect of a three-storey tower.
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.
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.
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.
