A very early “concrete canyon,” Fourth Avenue was one of the wonders of the world a century ago. At that time it was second only to Wall Street as a banking center. This view, from the skywalk between Oxford Centre and Macy’s, gives us some idea of what it looked like back then: an absurdly narrow street flanked by absurdly tall buildings. The Fourth Avenue bank towers are dwarfed now by the modern skyscrapers in the Golden Triangle, but the narrowness of the street still accents their height and makes the canyon seem even deeper.
The City-County Building, which houses a miscellaneous collection of offices for the governments of both Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, is one of Henry Hornbostel’s greatest works. It’s a perfect use of architecture to express an idea. Your local government is a great and magnificent, indeed almost imperial, institution; but at the same time it is perfectly accessible to you, the common citizen, through the gargantuan arches that face the street. All this grandeur exists to serve you.
A perfectly Romanesque lion guards the entrance to the Allegheny County Courthouse. When H. H. Richardson designed the building, the lion was meant to be nearer street level; but shaving one storey’s worth of height off Grant Street left it high on the front wall.
In honor of the physicians who served in the First World War, Hygeia, goddess of health and proper sanitation, raises her torch in Schenley Park. Phipps Conservatory is in the background.
You can read the proudly technical description of the cars’ features and details, although oddly the “doors per side” spec leaves out the extra street-level door (what we might call the “Pittsburgh door”) at the front. The same Spanish company made the cars for Sacramento’s light-rail system, as well as many European tram networks.
These are the newer cars on the Pittsburgh rails, the 4300 series. The older cars, the 4200 series, came from Siemens Duewag in Duesseldorf. They have almost all been rebuilt to the same standards as the newer cars, so that they’re nearly indistinguishable from the CAF cars. Aside from the car numbers, the easiest way to distinguish the cars is from the front or back. The Siemens cars have a pair of headlights side by side in the center; the CAF cars have headlights toward the sides, like a conventional automobile or bus. The Siemens cars also have a “Cyclops eye,” a separate high-beam light mounted on top of the car; the CAF cars have the high beam incorporated into the body of the car above the windshield.
The Port Authority bought 55 Siemens cars to run on the rebuilt Route 42 line in the 1980s; the other lines, too rickety for the heavy new trolleys, still ran PCC cars. In 2004, the Route 47 line through Overbrook reopened after extensive reconstruction, and the Port Authority bought 28 cars from CAF. In total, that makes 83 cars, but old Pa Pitt has had some trouble figuring out how many are actually in service. Some Siemens cars may not have been rebuilt, and may be languishing somewhere in the enormous car barn at South Hills Village. At any rate, the number in service is fairly large, since the cars are run in pairs during rush hour, averaging less then five minutes apart downtown.
Update: Here is old Pa Pitt’s most recent map of Pittsburgh rapid transit:
Click on the image for a PDF copy.
The article below is kept here for historical reasons, but the map below is out of date.
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What, again?
Not entirely satisfied with the results of his previous attempt, Father Pitt has employed a somewhat more sophisticated drawing program to create another schematic map of Pittsburgh rapid transit. This one is simpler and more utilitarian, but also more legible, or at least old Pa Pitt hopes it is.
A brief summary (a more discursive description of rapid transit in Pittsburgh is at the earlier article):
Trolleys run on the street in Allentown and Beechview, but otherwise on their own dedicated right-of-way. Downtown they run in the subway. There are three underground stations (Steel Plaza, Wood Street, Gateway Center) and one elevated station (First Avenue); all other stations and stops are at ground level.
Inclines are funicular railways that climb the steep slope of Mount Washington.
Busways are like rubber-tired metro lines, with complete grade separation, infrequent stops, and high speeds between stops. Most busway routes make a loop on the street downtown.
The contraflow bus lane in Oakland is the sort of thing that counts as “bus rapid transit” in other cities. It helps, but it’s not good enough.
In addition to these lines, of course, there are nearly two hundred bus routes that run in street traffic. See the Port Authority’s web site for detailed schedules. There are also numerous interurban routes run by various transit authorities outside Allegheny County.
An update: Mr. Ken Zapinski remarks, “I would suggest adding the HOV lanes to the north which carry express/commuter service from the North Hills, but including that makes configuration of the map difficult.”
The HOV (“high-occupancy vehicle”) lanes he mentions are a set of inner lanes, completely separated from the main highway, that run from the Lower Hill just outside downtown up the middle of Interstate 579 and 279. They are open to inbound traffic in the morning and outbound traffic in the evening, and they do carry commuter buses as well as the few carpoolers who manage to comply with the absurdly lenient restriction to vehicles with two or more occupants.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Port Authority published rapid-transit maps including those HOV lanes as well as the trolleys and busways (the West Busway had not been built yet). Since then, for some reason, the Port Authority has not published a good map of the whole system, preferring to hand out individual maps of the various parts of it.
Father Pitt considered adding the HOV lanes, but left them out for two reasons: first, because there are no stops along the way, meaning that the ordinary carless traveler cannot use their presence on the map to answer the question of how to get from here to there; and second, because (as Mr. Zapinski remarks) they make the map harder to draw.
The HOV lanes do, however, materially improve commuting from the North Hills; the buses have a far easier time of it than the ordinary one-per-car commuter who sits in traffic and curses. Old Pa Pitt may reconsider the map some day soon.
Another update:Chris Briem at Null Space (a remarkably intelligent blog on Pittsburgh economic issues) kindly links to this article and remarks, “Not sure the Mon Incline counts as rapid, but I won’t quibble.”
Father Pitt uses the term “rapid transit” in place of the far more cumbersome “fixed-guideway systems,” which is what the Port Authority prefers. English is not a bureaucrat’s first language. Except for the Allentown and Beechview street-running sections on the trolley lines, what all these lines have in common is that they avoid street traffic. (And it’s hard to call what happens in Allentown or Beechview “traffic.”)
As for the inclines, they move slowly, but it would be hard to imagine a way of getting from the bottom to the top of Mount Washington that would be faster and didn’t involve a rocket pack.
For about a century, Phipps Conservatory, the gift of Andrew Carnegie’s friend Henry Phipps, belonged to the Ciry of Pittsburgh. After it was turned over to a private nonprofit group, Phipps started to grow and flourish like a tropical vine. This new entrance, opened a few years ago, is a perfect match for the splendid Victorian glasshouses behind it. Yet it is also unmistakably contemporary. This is a textbook example of architecture that is sympathetic to its surroundings without being slavishly imitative. (Not, old Pa Pitt hastens to add, that there is anything wrong with slavish imitation once in a while.)
