Garden Way looking eastward from Fisk Street.
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An Alley in Lawrenceville
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Alley in Lawrenceville
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Garden Way, looking eastward toward Children’s Hospital.
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Steeple of Third Presbyterian Church, Shadyside
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Seen from Ewers Way.
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Charette Way
This short alley no longer has a street sign, but it still appears on maps as Charette Way, which seems like a peculiar name for an alley.
From OpenStreetMap, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). A “charette” is a term well known to architects: it’s a session of intense work to meet a deadline. Supposedly it comes from the charrette or cart that used to come around to collect the drawings at the French architectural schools, with the students frantically putting the final touches on their work as the cart rumbled along. The magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club for many years was called The Charette.
In 1928, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club got itself club rooms with an entrance on the right-hand side of this tiny alley, and with the aid of some friends in government, Charles Stotz, the club president, managed to have the alley renamed “Charette Way.”
Kodak EasyShare Z981. From the January, 1929, issue of The Charette, we reprint the story of the name.
Charette Way—Number One
New Address of the Club Rooms of the P. A. C.
The passer-by will notice a new street sign marking the little alley leading off Cecil Place. To many the name will mean nothing more than another odd street name. To the few who recognize the French origin of the word it will seem to be quite appropriate with the store trucks constantly entering and leaving the picturesque little street, but for those interested in using the attractive doorway entering off the right side of the alley, the name “Charette Way” has considerable significance. It is a curious fact that the Architectural Club is not only in possession of an ideally central down-town location, but has also been able to christen the alley which it fronts. We direct the attention of the skeptics to the City Ordinance reproduced herewith. The prompt execution of this bit of business is due to the cooperation of Councilman W. Y. English, to whom the Club at its last meeting extended a unanimous vote of thanks.
AN ORDINANCE—Naming an Unnamed Way lying between Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue and running from Fifth Avenue to The Rosenbaum property line, “Charette Way.”
SECTION 1. Be it ordained and enacted by the City of Pittsburgh, in Council assembled, and it is hereby ordained and enacted by the authority of the same. That an Unnamed Way lying between Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue and running from Fifth Avenue to The Rosenbaum property line, be and the same is named “Charette Way.”
SECTION 2. That any Ordinance or part of Ordinance conflicting with the provisions of this ordinance be and the same is hereby repealed so are as the same affects this Ordinance.
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The Strawberry Way Time Machine
At the intersection of two impossibly narrow alleys downtown is a little remnant of old Pittsburgh from before the age of skyscrapers, and even before the age of six-storey Victorian palaces of commerce. This is the only place downtown where you can get a hint of what back-alley Pittsburgh looked like when the city was mostly confined to the Triangle, and every square foot was inhabited. All the back alleys were crowded with little houses like these. The two tiny two-storey houses may date from as late as the 1880s, when they seem to have replaced frame houses of roughly equal dimensions; but they were built in an indeterminate vernacular style that would not have looked out of place in the Pittsburgh of a hundred years earlier. The taller building on the corner is older, and we can see by the patchwork of bricks that it once had a tiny storefront with a corner entrance.
As small as the building is, and as wide as the lens is on old Pa Pitt’s Fuji HS10, it was still necessary to make a composite picture to get the whole Montour Way front of this little house. Please forgive a bit of glare at the top: the sun was behind the building.
The taller houses behind the tiny ones were preserved by being converted into part of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club in 1930.
Today these buildings give us something unique squashed between the looming skyscrapers: one block of the old Pittsburgh, as it looked before the great expansion after the Civil War. We hope they can be preserved. Right now they seem to be in no danger; the Allegheny HYP club is still going, and the other buildings are inhabited by a tailor so exclusive that a small sign on a back alley suffices for advertising.
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Larkins Way, South Side
It is impossible to resist taking pictures of these narrow South Side alleys. Fortunately, with digital photography, a photograph is within a mill or two of free, so there is no reason to resist the temptation.
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The Mystery of the Converted Church on the South Side
Update: The mystery is solved, thanks to an alert reader who has earned old Pa Pitt’s gratitude. This was the Second Methodist Church of East Birmingham, opened in 1872 and sold at a sheriff’s sale in 1874. There must be an interesting story in the short period between those two dates; usually being a Methodist wasn’t such a risky business.
The original text of the article is below.
If anyone knows the history of this building on Larkins Way at 23rd Street, Father Pitt would be happy to hear it. That it was a church at one point is obvious. It fits the pattern of small Pittsburgh churches of the middle and late nineteenth century exactly, and those blocked-in Gothic windows on the end would tell the story if nothing else did. But it was not a church for long before it was converted to four tiny alley houses. It appears without a label as a single undivided building on an 1882 map at the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, but not in 1872, so it was probably built at some time in the 1870s. By 1890 it is already shown as divided into four parts, probably rental houses, since they were all owned by Jane Morgan. It continued under single ownership through 1923, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt knows about it.
So what kind of congregation failed in less than twenty years’ time? It is an interesting mystery, and Father Pitt has not yet solved it.
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The Mysterious Heads in Coffey Way
The Liberty Avenue face of this building has been modernized and remodernized so many times that no one would take it for anything remarkably old. But it is actually one of the very few commercial buildings remaining downtown from the Civil War era. It was built in about 1865 for Arbuckle & Company, a dealer in coffee and sugar in the days when Liberty Avenue was the wholesale food district, with a railroad running right down the middle to bring the food in at its freshest. And if you will come around the back with us, you will see one of Pittsburgh’s odd little hidden treasures.
The short alley behind the building is still called Coffey Way, and the back of the Arbuckle building shows the very old bricks we might expect. And among those bricks, in an alley that hardly anyone even knows about, we find “some of the oldest surviving architectural sculpture in the city,” according to Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture by Marilyn Evert.
These medallions are obviously meant to represent specific figures, but no one is quite sure which specific figures. This one has been identified as George Washington or Colonel Bouquet (the one who built the blockhouse).
This keen-eyed lady has been identified as Jane Grey Swisshelm or Mary Croghan Schenley.
This is probably an allegorical head of Liberty, although it has also been identified as an “Indian head” of the sort common on nineteenth-century coins.
This one is very likely to be Abraham Lincoln, but “very likely” is the most certainty we can summon up. It could also be John Arbuckle himself, the head of the firm, who appears in a later photograph with a beard and distinctively hollow cheeks. We note that this is the only one of the faces turned left instead of right; if you like to find symbolism in things like that, go ahead.
John Arbuckle, incidentally, was the inventor of processes for preserving coffee and automating its packaging, so we may regard him as the founder of coffee as a mass-produced consumer product. This little alley, therefore, ought to be on every coffee-lover’s pilgrimage list.
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Coffey Way
Looking toward Sixth Avenue.
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An Alley on the South Side
A long-lens view of Carey Way.
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