Father Pitt

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The Great Soho Curve; or, Why We Don’t Have Cable Cars Anymore

From “Flem’s” Views of Old Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: George T. Fleming, 1905), p. 43.

This photograph of the Great Soho Curve, a maintenance nightmare for the cable cars that very briefly made up Pittsburgh’s transit system, was taken in 1893. It appears to have been taken from the roof of a house about where the ramp from Fifth Avenue to the Boulevard of the Allies is today. Fifth Avenue still makes this double curve, though the street is one-way inbound now, and the cable cars are gone.

This picture tells the story of why we don’t have cable cars anymore. Pittsburgh streets have curves, and curves are bad for cable cars. In this picture, the entire curve is lined with cable access points about every six feet, and the picture shows cars stopped while men are fussing with one of the cables. In San Francisco, the one city where cable-car lines are still in service, the lines are all perfectly straight, except for turns at intersections. When electric traction came along, it was obviously more suitable for Pittsburgh—except where hills were prohibitively steep, and for those places we have inclines, which are a kind of cable car permanently attached to the cable.

That fairy castle on the hill at upper left is the Ursuline Young Ladies’ Academy, designed by Joseph Stillburg. It has long since been replaced by more mundane buildings at Carlow University, but this picture shows the impression it must have made as you rode the cable car out from downtown toward Oakland.

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February 7, 2025
George Washington Memorial, Allegheny Commons

Edward Ludwig Albert Pausch was the sculptor of this monument, which Wikipedia tells us is his most ambitious work. It is meant to show Washington at the age of 23, when he was failing to keep the French out of Pittsburgh—although since Pausch modeled the face on the Houdon bust sculpted in 1785, our young colonel looks a bit old and weary for a 23-year-old.

As equestrian statues go, this one is not Father Pitt’s favorite. It is probably a very good one, but it strikes old Pa Pitt as stiffly posed. The pile of vegetative debris that holds the horse up by the stomach does not help; it makes George look like he’s posing on a carousel pony. Most equestrian statues stand on their own four legs—but then most are made of bronze. This one is in granite.

The monument was given by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, a fraternal order for people who could prove they weren’t Catholic. The Jr. O. U. A. M. was a big deal a century or so ago, and the local group’s splendid building in Oakland still stands at 3400 Forbes Avenue.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Sony Alpha 3000.

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February 6, 2025
Bloomfield Trust Company

This fine new building opened in 1926, and the bank got to enjoy it for five years before it was liquidated in the dark days of the Depression. After that, it sat vacant for a while. Just after Prohibition ended, the Liquor Control Board picked it for a liquor store, but bids for the conversion came in too high, and the board went looking for another location. Later, at some point, it became a bank again. Now the bank has moved out, and it’s ready for its next life.

As you can see from the picture above, the streets do not intersect at a right angle at this corner, so the building is a trapezoid. The upper floors were built as apartments to gain some extra income to pay for the building.

Kodak EasyShare Z981.

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February 5, 2025
Knoxville

The slopes of Knoxville, an independent borough until it was taken into Pittsburgh in 1927. Below, two very different towers: the tower of St. Canice on the left and the U. S. Steel Tower on the right.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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February 5, 2025
Masonic Hall, North Side

Bartberger & East were the architects of this Masonic Hall, which sat derelict and in danger of demolition for many years. (The Bartberger of the partnership was Charles M. Barberger, the younger of the two Charles Bartbergers.)¹ Now it is beautifully restored as a center of literary culture, which teaches us not to lose hope.

The building was put up in 1893, as you can tell by reading the super-secret Masonic code in terra cotta on the front: “A. L. 5893.” “A. L.” stands for anno lucis, “in the year of light,” a Masonic dating system that takes the creation of the world as its starting point. At the risk of suffering the fate of William Morgan, old Pa Pitt will reveal the secret calculation that converts A. L. dates to our Gregorian calendar: subtract 4000.

Like most lodge buildings of the time, this one had the main assembly hall upstairs, leaving rentable storefronts on the ground floor. The side entrance on Reddour Street, which led up to the main hall, is festooned with carvings by Achille Giammartini.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Sony Alpha 3000; FujiFilm FinePix HS10.

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February 4, 2025
Outbound Trolley on Broadway, Beechview, in 1999

Outbound car 4133 rounds the curve on Broadway, Beechview, in 1999, on route 42 (now the Red Line). The Siemens SD-400 car is in its original 1980s livery. It was later rebuilt as part of the 4200 series.

And that should be enough numbers to leave the trolley geeks drooling.

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February 3, 2025
Garage Done Right

In the 1920s and 1930s, designers of houses often made them into fairy-tale cottages, in which every detail was carefully managed to evoke picturesque fantasies of old England or France. But this was also the time when built-in garages were becoming a requirement for suburban homes. If the garage door is on the front, it often spoils the fantasy. But this house in Mission Hills, Mount Lebanon, shows us that there is an alternative: make the garage part of the fantasy.

Not only is the garage entrance a big stone arch that suggests an immemorially ancient cellar under the house, but it is also decorated with the terra-cotta rays that were a fashionable adornment of the fairy-tale style.

Kodak EasyShare Z1281.

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February 3, 2025
Witch Hazel

Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

Ozark Witch Hazel (Hamamelis vernalis) grows very happily in Pittsburgh, and the first warm winter day from January onwards it will open up these curious little flowers. If you cut some twigs in the cold weather and bring them in to put in a vase, the flowers will open in a day or two and start filling the room with perfume.

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February 2, 2025
St. Joseph’s Church and School, Mount Oliver

St. Joseph’s was an old German parish in Mount Oliver—the part of Mount Oliver that became a city neighborhood, not the adjacent borough of the same name. The land for the church was bought before the Civil War, but the war interrupted the plans, and instead of a church the hastily erected Fort Jones (named for B. F. Jones of Jones & Laughlin) went up on this hilltop to keep the Confederates out of Pittsburgh. Apparently it worked, because you hardly ever see Confederate cavalry riding through Mount Oliver. After the war, the cornerstone of the church was laid in 1868, and the church was dedicated in 1870.

In 1951, the old church burned down, which was a sad blow to the neighborhood—but it made way for this fine building, which was dedicated in 1953. The Catholic congregation left the building in 2005, but the current owners have kept it from falling down.¹

Update: Once again, all it took was publishing the pictures, and the information came in. The architects of the rebuilding were Marlier & Johnstone,² who at about the same time designed St. Henry’s nearby in Arlington. What is even more interesting is that the old church is not entirely gone. It appears that, in the picture above, the side wall and transept, where you see the arched windows, are from the burned-out original church—but with the new construction so skillfully worked around it that old Pa Pitt had not even realized that part of the church was 85 years older than the rest.

The most striking feature of the building is this broad-arched porte cochère, with a long drive making the otherwise steep ascent from Ormsby Street easy.

The rectory, built in 1889, is a well-preserved example of Second Empire architecture. Even the decorative ironwork railing on the tower is still intact.

The school is neglected. In 2011, the old school, part of which dated to the 1870s, burned in a spectacular fire. The part that is left probably dates from the 1920s, with a postwar addition in the 1950s or 1960s.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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February 2, 2025
Eberhardt & Ober Brewery, Dutchtown

These pictures were taken in 1999 with a Lubitel twin-lens-reflex camera, and old Pa Pitt just happened to run across them a while ago. Very little has changed, and we could probably pass these off as current pictures without remark. The main building is one of the relatively few remaining substantial works of Joseph Stillburg, who for a while was one of the major architectural forces in Pittsburgh. His buildings occupied prominent locations, and most of them were therefore replaced later by even bigger buildings.

February 1, 2025