Here are some utility cables with an old hotel behind them. The Hotel Lieb was a neighborhood hotel in the common Pittsburgh sense of being a bar with a few rooms above, because liquor licenses were fiendishly hard to get for bars but easy for hotels. It was built in the early 1900s at the intersection of Sarah Street with the oddly angled 29th Street, and the unusual angle is mitigated by cutting off the corner and putting the entrance there.
More of the front doors, with their charming woodwork, and the mysterious breezeways (which are not much of a mystery) of the South Side.
Parlor windows and transoms over the front door are often decorated with stained glass. Old Pa Pitt has been out wandering the South Side in the evening to bring back a few pictures of stained glass the way it was meant to be seen.
These houses date from before 1872, to judge by both old maps and the general shape of the houses. Some have been more drastically altered than others. Old Pa Pitt is particularly interested in the one that has had a new “used-brick” façade added, but whose sides—as you can just make out in this picture—are still sheathed in asphalt sheets with a cartoon stone pattern.
A matched pair of Second Empire houses in nearly perfect shape except for the modern dormer windows. The folk-art etching in the lintels is charming.
Each one of them has had its individual adventures, but it seems fairly certain that this row of half a dozen frame houses with narrow dormers dates from before 1872. Together they form something of a manual or catalogue of things that can happen to a frame house in Pittsburgh over the course of a century and a half.
Another small celebration of the varieties of woodwork to be found on South Side houses.
According to old maps, this building was put up in the 1880s. It is typical of the Second Empire style as it trickled down to smaller buildings. Most of it is relatively plain, but note the elaborate brickwork of the chimneys. The dormers may be simplified replacements of the originals, but they harmonize well with the style of the building. Currently the building seems to have four apartments, but it may have been a private house. It is not large, but it stands on a block of much smaller frame houses and thus looks bigger than it is.
You probably thought old Pa Pitt had reached the frozen limit of esoteric obsession when he brought you large collections of breezeways. You were mistaken. With the long lens on his Fuji HS10 camera, he is able to pick out clear pictures of chimney pots, and he has always been fascinated by chimney pots. They are still found on some of the oldest houses in the neighborhood, and they come in a wonderful variety of shapes and decorations. Expect to see many more pictures of chimney pots, but these are a good start.
