From the corner of Penn Avenue and 17th Street.
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The Boulevard
Brookline Boulevard, known simply as “the Boulevard” in the neighborhood, is the broadest commercial street in Pittsburgh—which surprises visitors from flat cities, where it would be at best a middling business street. It’s a curiously one-sided business strip: almost all the businesses are on the southwest side, the northeast side being primarily residential.
That may be because, for much of the neighborhood’s life, it was effectively two streets. When trolleys ran in Brookline, Brookline Boulevard was two narrow strips for cars, with trolleys in a separate median in the middle—much like Broadway in Dormont along the current Red Line. Removing the trolleys and paving the median created the exceptionally broad street.
The Brookline business district is one that is seldom thought of as a destination for shoppers from out of the neighborhood. But it should be. It has very few chain stores, but it is prosperous enough that storefronts are seldom empty for long. The result is a delightful mix of little one-off shops, cafés, and ethnic restaurants.
The tower in the distance is the lookout tower of Engine House Fifty-Seven.
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Night Scene on the Monongahela
“Night Scene on the Monongahela River Near Pittsburgh, Pa., Showing a Portion of the Plants of the Pittsburgh Steel Co.” A striking view from a booklet published by the Pittsburgh Steel Company in 1911.
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Belasco Safety Island, Beechview
A passenger waits for a Red Line car on the Belasco safety island on Broadway, the main street of the Beechview neighborhood. His wait will not be long.
This 4200-series car rolled up seconds after the earlier picture was taken.
Pittsburgh used to be full of safety islands like these; wherever there was a broad street, the streetcars usually ran in the middle of it, avoiding the chaos of parking and double-parking along the edges. Broadway is the only street that has kept its safety islands, since elsewhere the streetcars mostly have their own right-of-way. (Warrington Avenue, used by the Brown Line when it is active, is narrow enough that passengers board from the curb.) There are three stops along the street trackage in Beechview; two others were eliminated a few years ago. Now Belasco is scheduled to be replaced with a platform-level station, which will be a boon to handicapped riders in Beechview. That will leave only the safety islands at Shiras and the single safety island at Hampshire (outbound passengers there board from the curb).
Above we can see the inbound safety island on the left. Behind the outbound stop, incidentally, is a typical Pittsburgh cliff house: a house whose street entrance is on the top floor, with the rest of the house clinging to a steep slope down from the street.
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Why You Can’t Fight City Hall
Because City Hall knows everything, as we can see from this 1892 view of one of the filing rooms in the old Pittsburgh City Hall. It came from a catalogue from the Office Specialty Mfg. Co, which supplied the filing cabinets.
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Looking Southward on Washington Road
The Washington Road business district as seen from Mount Lebanon Cemetery. Below, the Rollier’s clock tower, a relatively recent addition that anchors the north end of the business district perfectly.
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Engine House Fifty-Seven
A firehouse that looks very much like a firehouse, this was built in 1910, when the neighborhood was young, at a high point from which a fireman in the tower could see for miles.
