Or, you know, do your best. A typically Pittsburgh sign on Brookline Boulevard.
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Go Straight at the Intersection
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Brookline Methodist Episcopal Church
This church was finished in 1927 and continued to serve the Methodists until about a quarter-century ago. It now belongs to the Brookline Assembly, an Assemblies of God congregation. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to find out who the architect was, but there’s a wealth of other information at the wonderfully well-informed Brookline Connection site, including the interesting fact that the stone is Beaver County sandstone.
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Engine House Fifty-Seven, Brookline
A firehouse that looks like the Platonic ideal of a firehouse. The tower commands a view that must extend for miles: not only is the tower itself tall, but the station is built at the crest of a hill.
Addendum: The architects were Thomas W. Boyd & Co. This is a near-duplicate of the firehouse by the same firm at 3000 Chartiers Avenue, Sharaden, even though that one is dated 1928, eighteen years later
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Ash Wednesday in Brookline
You can tell it’s Ash Wednesday because churches in all the neighborhoods are offering fish ’n’ at. This church in Brookline was Presbyterian until recently, but now appears to be nondenominational.
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The Boulevard
Brookline Boulevard, known simply as “the Boulevard” in the neighborhood, is the broadest commercial street in Pittsburgh—which surprises visitors from flat cities, where it would be at best a middling business street. It’s a curiously one-sided business strip: almost all the businesses are on the southwest side, the northeast side being primarily residential.
That may be because, for much of the neighborhood’s life, it was effectively two streets. When trolleys ran in Brookline, Brookline Boulevard was two narrow strips for cars, with trolleys in a separate median in the middle—much like Broadway in Dormont along the current Red Line. Removing the trolleys and paving the median created the exceptionally broad street.
The Brookline business district is one that is seldom thought of as a destination for shoppers from out of the neighborhood. But it should be. It has very few chain stores, but it is prosperous enough that storefronts are seldom empty for long. The result is a delightful mix of little one-off shops, cafés, and ethnic restaurants.
The tower in the distance is the lookout tower of Engine House Fifty-Seven.
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Engine House Fifty-Seven
A firehouse that looks very much like a firehouse, this was built in 1910, when the neighborhood was young, at a high point from which a fireman in the tower could see for miles.
