A female and male mallard swimming in Schenley Park Lake in early May.
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The New Smithfield Street Bridge
“Pennsylvania.—New Steel Bridge Recently Erected Over the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh.” From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 11, 1883. Note that the bridge is half today’s width; the upstream half was added later.
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Kneeling Venus in the Phipps Palm House
You have to look hard to find her, but this statue, a gift from Henry Phipps to his conservatory, is still kneeling in the jungle to the left of the main entrance as you walk into the palm house.
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Flood of 1883: Inundation of Herr’s Island
From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 17, 1883. —This would be a rotten thing to happen to all those expensive townhouses today.
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Flood on the Allegheny near Kittanning, 1883
“Breaking of the Ice Gorge Near Kittanning,” from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 17, 1883. —The engravings in Leslie’s are always lively and show considerable care for accuracy.
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School for Blind Children
This building from 1894, right next to Schenley Farms in Oakland, was designed by George L. Orth, and still houses the school he designed it for.
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Schenley Farms
Stuck in a corner of the university district in Oakland, Schenley Farms is a delightful surprise. The institutional buildings of the University of Pittsburgh come to a sudden halt, and all at once there are tree-lined streets with century-old houses in a broad but harmonious variety of styles—everything from Italian Renaissance palaces to Tudor mansions to rustic stone cottages.
The streets are named after what the projectors of the neighborhood considered the greatest writers of the modern age. We can still see two of their names in brass in the sidewalk at the intersection of Parkman and Lytton—that’s Francis Parkman, the great American historian, and Lord Lytton, or Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the inspiration for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
