The West Side Belt Railroad came through Castle Shannon aerially on this long viaduct. Here we see it crossing the Blue and Silver Line trolley tracks. The line is still active as part of the Pittsburgh & West Virginia Railroad.
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Frame Houses of the Civil War Era
It is remarkable how unremarkable these two tiny houses on 24th Street are. The one on the left has had its parlor windows replaced with the usual mid-twentieth-century picture window, but most of the rest of the detail is intact; the one on the right probably looks not much different from the day it was built. And it was built at about the time of the Civil War or right after. These two houses appear on maps all the way back to 1872, the earliest detailed map of the area Father Pitt has been able to find. Brick houses from that time are common, but tiny frame houses like these seldom survive with original (or equivalent) wooden siding, which is almost always replaced with one of the Four Horsemen: aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Perma-Stone. If old Pa Pitt were dictator (and let it be known that if chosen dictator he would not serve), he would make these two houses a preservation priority.
In the picture below, note the size of the houses relative to the cars parked in front of them.
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Methodist Episcopal Deaconess’ Home, Uptown
This corner was associated with the Methodist Church for decades. The elaborately eclectic building on the corner was the Methodist Episcopal Deaconess’ Home; the fine brick house to the left of it, built as a private residence, was taken over by the Women’s Home Missionary Society of Pittsburgh, whose previous headquarters had been where the Deaconess’ Home was later built—or expanded, since Father Pitt believes he detects a typical prosperous merchant’s rowhouse on the corner swallowed by later accretions that made it an institutional building.
We certainly cannot accuse the architect of giving us monotonous surfaces.
The spelling “Deaconess’,” incidentally, comes from the 1923 map to which we referred. Father Pitt would have written “Deaconesses’,” on the assumption that more than one deaconess lived there.
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A Queen Anne Survivor on Craig Street
Among the institutional buildings and skyscraper apartments on Craig Street are a few domestic survivors of old Bellefield, the pleasant suburban village that occupied the eastern part of Oakland. Here is one of them, a fine Queen Anne house that has lost very little of its original splendor. It now houses the Tamarind Indian restaurant.
The richly decorated front gable is especially worth noting.
A bit of carving picked out by a very long lens.
The sub-gable over the side bay was richly decorated as well. Note the many textures that come together here: roof shingles (they would have been slate originally), wooden shingles, carved wood, wavy board siding, terra-cotta frieze, decoratively textured brick.
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Deutsche Evangelische Lutherische St. Paulus Kirche, Uptown
Since he ran across that article marveling at a church with the sanctuary upstairs, old Pa Pitt has been inspired to make a special study of these churches. Don’t be surprised to see more of them as Father Pitt accumulates the pictures.
St. Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church was built in 1872. Since Uptown was a dense rowhouse neighborhood, the church had a tiny lot, and resorted to the common expedient of putting the sanctuary on the second floor. Today it is home to the Shepherd’s Heart Fellowship, and we caught it in the middle of some spiffing up.
We might point out that this church is marked on an 1882 map as “Dutch Lutheran Church.” When misinformed pedants insist on calling East Allegheny “Deutschtown” (a pedantry that is flat-out wrong and makes old Pa Pitt’s skin crawl every time he hears it), you can point out that “Dutch” was the usual word for “German,” and English-speakers in Pittsburgh commonly referred to the Germans as “Dutch” even as late as the 1880s.
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The Rolfe Houses, South Side
Our 1872 map shows the house on the left as belonging to J. Rolfe and the one on the right to H. H. Rolfe. At some point the one on the left had a storefront added, which at some later point was blocked in by a competent contractor who was certainly not an architect. Otherwise, these two elegant houses on Carson Street probably look very much the way they looked a century and a half ago, when they entered the city of Pittsburgh with the annexation of Birmingham.
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Concordia Club, Oakland
The Schenley Farms section of Oakland was crusty with clubs a century ago, but few were as influential as this one.
Charles Bickel designed this elegant clubhouse for a Jewish gentlemen’s club made up mostly of members of the Rodef Shalom congregation. To call it a gentlemen’s club brings up images of well-dressed men sitting inert with newspapers in their hands, but these gentlemen were far from inert. These were gentlemen who got things done. This club was the incubator of Reform Judaism; it was at the club (when it lived on the North Side) that the Pittsburgh Platform was signed.
This clubhouse was built in 1913, and the club continued to use it for almost a century. It finally fell to the same forces that evicted most of the other clubs in this section: declining membership in our antisocial age, and the bottomless well of money that the University of Pittsburgh can draw on. It was sold to Pitt in 2009, and is now known as the O’Hara Student Center.
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150 Years of the South Side
These houses on South 26th Street are more than 150 years old, and nobody cares. That is one of the fascinating and delightful things about the South Side: you have to discover history for yourself, because history is not labeled and pickled in brine for you here.
As of this year, the South Side has been part of Pittsburgh for a century and a half. In 1872, the boroughs of South Pittsburgh, Birmingham, East Birmingham, and Ormsby were taken into the city. Since then quite a lot has changed, but it’s surprising how much has not changed. Father Pitt has decided to celebrate the 150 years of the South Side by looking for the things that were there in 1872 and are still there now. In the coming weeks you’ll see quite a few more remnants of old Birmingham and East Birmingham.
But how do we know which buildings date from that era? The Pittsburgh Historic Maps site is Father Pitt’s favorite research tool. You can look at a detailed house-by-house map from 1872, and then switch to a current satellite view. Many familiar shapes will appear on both maps. This row of once-identical houses is one of them.
Most of the oldest houses on the South Side are fairly modest, and these were more modest than most. In the years since they were built, each house has had its separate adventures. Today they all look different, each one bearing alterations from different eras. One of them has sprouted an outsized dormer that gives it a third floor. One has ornamental shutters by the windows. One has star bolts holding it together. One has smaller horizontal windows upstairs. Two of them have mid-twentieth-century picture windows in the front parlors. Two have aluminum awnings. Several have had the front doors reconfigured, losing the wooden doorframe and transom.
There were originally two identical rows of seven houses in this block of 26th Street, separated by the alley (Larkins Way). The second row is down to four houses now, all of which have been through similarly various adventures.
But if we put all these houses together in our minds, we can come up with the Platonic ideal of the South Side rowhouse of the middle 1800s. This is what we’ll be doing as we celebrate 150 years of the South Side: looking through the modern accretions to find the Birmingham and East Birmingham (and maybe South Pittsburgh and Ormsby) of a century and a half ago.
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E. Martina, Sidewalk Contractor
To judge by other pictures of E. Martina plaques on line, a decorative surface of exposed pebbles seems to have been this contractor’s trademark style. This sidewalk is along 18th Street on the South Side.
The delightfully eclectic Pittsburgh Orbit site has made a thorough study of sidewalk plaques and stamps. It will open your eyes to a whole world of artistic treasures literally under your feet.
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South Hills High School, Mount Washington
Here is a large institutional building whose story of abandonment and decay has a happy ending.
South Hills High School was Pittsburgh’s second great palace of high-school education, right after Schenley High School. For this one, the city hired Alden & Harlow, arguably the most prestigious institutional architects money could buy. They were responsible for the Carnegie Institute and all the branch libraries, in addition to multiple millionaires’ mansions and skyscrapers downtown.
The site of the school is improbably vertical. In those days, “South Hills” meant the back slopes of Mount Washington, and a walk along the side of this school is a steep climb. But the architects met the challenge with a Tudor Gothic palace that seems to have grown on the site. It takes up a whole city block.
The Ruth Street side of the school opened in 1917; the rest of the school—planned from the beginning—opened in 1925. For many years the school took in students from the South Hills and beyond—“beyond” meaning Banksville, Beechview, and Brookline. In 1976, a monstrously modernist new school—Brashear—opened in Beechview, which took in all the students from the southern neighborhoods. With population declining and the building getting old, the city decided to close South Hills altogether in 1986.
And then it sat and rotted for 23 years.
But, as we said, the story has a happy ending. As you see from these pictures, the building is well taken care of now. In 2010 it reopened as apartments for senior citizens, so that once again it is an ornament to its neighborhood.
The wonderfully thorough Brookline Connection site has a long article about South Hills High School, including the architects’ plans.
