Beechview’s streets are laid out in a grid. The topography rebels against grids, so streets are often interrupted for a block by stairways—as we see here on Andick Way. This is a very common phenomenon in Pittsburgh neighborhoods. The stairways appeared on published maps as streets, and in the early days of GPS that made navigation hazardous. Today most GPS systems have figured out which blocks are impassible to motor vehicles.
A roundup of spring flowers blooming yesterday. Above, a purple crocus. Below, a yellow crocus.
This view of the west side of Broadway in Beechview shows us a very Pittsburghish commercial district. The architecture is miscellaneous, including apartment buildings, commercial buildings, houses with storefront extensions, and tiny one-storey gap-filler storefronts. The street curves, so the buildings are not all perfectly rectangular. And of course this is Pittsburgh, so the whole row is on what in other cities would be called a steep slope, though in Pittsburgh we expect the Red Line streetcars to negotiate it.
A good apartment-building design makes its residents feel better off than they are. Here you can imagine yourself walking into a stately English home by Robert Adam, even if your portion of it is only a studio apartment.
We looked at the Church of the Ascension a little while ago. Here is a view of the entire south side of it that took twelve individual photographs to capture. That is the kind of effort old Pa Pitt is willing to put into documenting his city’s architecture for you, his beloved readers. The whole picture is nearly 11 megabytes, so don’t click or tap on it if you’re on a metered connection.
We’ve already seen this building from the side and rear. Here is most of it from the front, with the Boulevard of the Allies ramp and the low roofline of Chinatown in the foreground. From this angle we can see, if we know its history, how the building was put up in two stages: the original was eight storeys tall, and then five more storeys (counting the top storey, which has no windows on the front) were added a decade later. That accounts for the unorthodox stripe of ornament across the middle, which used to be the cap of the building. But the architects, MacClure and Spahr, did such a good job of extending the building that, without knowing its history, we would never have guessed that the top floors were added later.
Addendum: According to an article in the Engineering News for January 18, 1917, the addition was planned when the original building was put up, so MacClure & Spahr had to create a building that would look complete at two stages. That’s how you separate the pros from the amateurs in the architecture business.
It used to be a common sight all over the city: “catenary,” the complex assembly of wires hanging over the street to power the streetcars. The complexity comes from the necessity of keeping the wires that actually provide power almost straight (so that the pantograph on the trolley is always touching them), which can be done only by bracing them and pulling them from all directions.
The only long sections of live street trackage left in Pittsburgh are Broadway in Beechview, seen here, and the Brown Line, which is not in regular service but takes the other lines over Mount Washington (via Warrington and Arlington Avenues) when the Transit Tunnel is closed for maintenance. There you can still examine live catenary and marvel at the geometry of it.
