Belgian block is a pavement made of brick-shaped stones, more or less uniform, but usually rather less than more. Pittsburghers call it “cobblestone,” having lost the memory of what real cobblestones are like. (A real cobblestone is an irregular smooth, round stone, and cobblestone pavements are quite a bit bumpier than Belgian-block pavements.) Countless Belgian-block pavements still exist in Pittsburgh, and often preparations for repaving an asphalt street reveal the Belgian blocks beneath, still perfectly intact, as they will be when archaeologists dig them up a thousand years from now.
This pavement is on an industrial street near the river on the South Side. Old Pa Pitt admits to not knowing the purpose of what appear to be iron spikes in a more or less straight line.
Old Colonel Bouquet was proud enough of his little blockhouse that he carved his name in the stone above the door. Or rather he had one of his minions do it, because officers don’t have to do things like that for themselves.
The rafters in the roof are almost all original. When the fort became superfluous in the late 1700s, the little building was sold off and ended up a private dwelling.
Eventually the Daughters of the American Revolution bought the place and stripped away the later accretions. Now the blockhouse looks much as it did when Col. Bouquet was in charge.
Bouquet, by the way, may have been proud enough to put his name on the blockhouse; but finding that he had the honor of naming the fort and the little trading town that instantly appeared beside it, he chose to name them both after William Pitt, prime minister at the time, who was largely credited with the British victories against France all over the world.
Back in the good old days, when people took pride in their work, or at least when bronze was cheaper, some contractors would put a bronze plate in the concrete of every sidewalk they laid. They were meant to be permanent, and they do seem to last at least as long as the sidewalks around them. Some of the most ornate plates were the ones left by the Wadsworth Stone & Paving Co., whose plates are works of art in themselves. This one was set in a sidewalk in Squirrel Hill.
The top of the Benedum-Trees Building, one of the famous bank towers that made Fourth Avenue one of the wonders of the world at the very beginning of the age of skyscrapers. The Fourth Avenue historic district is a few blocks’ walk from the Steel Plaza subway station.
Update: This article is kept here for historical reasons, but the map here is out of date. For an up-to-date map, see Father Pitt’s latest article on Pittsburgh rapid transit.
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Old Pa Pitt is amused. He finds endless fun in the workings of bureaucracy. The Port Authority is now operating under its new system of route names, and it’s perfectly obvious what happened.
Click on the image for a PDF map.
Can you spot it? Though Pa Pitt drew this map himself, he took the colors as well as the route names from the official Transit Development Plan map on the Port Authority’s site. It seems quite obvious to him that, at some point early in the revision, some genius hit on exactly the same idea that Father Pitt has been proposing for quite some time now: integrate all our forms of rapid transit (“fixed-guideway systems,” to use the language of bureaucrats) in a single system, with lines designated by colors, and you’ll have a first-rate Pittsburgh Metro.
Why are the routes that run on the East Busway designated by the letter P? Why do the ones on the South Busway begin with Y, and the West Busway with G? Obviously because the lines are purple, yellow, and green. But you won’t find that connection made anywhere on the Port Authority’s map.
Father Pitt would be happy to be corrected by someone who was privy to the actual decisions, but it seems obvious to him that the original proposal was just what he had suggested: include the busways in the system of colored rapid-transit lines. But somewhere along the way, some high-level bureaucrat lost his nerve. It would be too confusing to cal the Martin Luther King, Jr., East Busway the “Purple Line,” he thought. We’ll make it easier by calling it Routes P1 and P2, and we won’t mention the color purple anywhere just to keep from confusing people.
This is the way bureaucrats think, and Father Pitt would not be at all surprised to find that they had thought that way in this case.
Old Pa Pitt will admit to being a little baffled by the routes that use the Fifth Avenue bus lane in Oakland. They’re designated by R, and the line is dark red; but there’s another Red Line already. We haven’t quite run out of colors yet, you know. Orange is very popular in other urban transit systems.
The good news is that we’re halfway to common sense. The map already shows us what ought to be. Here’s a case where citizen activists can take over. We can simply start referring to the busways by their colors on the map. Call the West Busway the Green Line. It’s a green line on the map, isn’t it? Call the East Busway the Purple Line and the South Busway the Yellow Line. Sooner or later, the Port Authority will adopt what we have already made the de facto terminology.
Forsythia lights up the landscape this time of year with improbably bright yellow flowers. This little bush grew at the edge of the woods in Mount Lebanon.
Not since “Renaissance II” in the 1980s has so much construction been going on downtown. Now, as then, a subway line is a big part of it, but new landmark buildings have also gone up, and the Diamond, as we see here, is being completely redesigned. (Planning maps call it “Market Square,” but the best way to explain it to suburbanites and visitors is to say that it’s spelled “Market Square” and pronounced “Diamond.”) While the rest of the country was plunged deep into recession, Pittsburgh was having its biggest building boom in a quarter century.
