Carey Way on the South Side, between 18th and 19th Streets.
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Alley Houses
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Observatory Hill in 2000
Three pictures taken with a Russian Lubitel twin-lens-reflex camera in January of 2000. Very little has changed in 21 years. Above, the Byzantine Catholic Seminary, a building that is a strange mix of modernist and classical elements with an onion dome.
The Byzantine metropolitan’s residence. In the Latin Rite, Pittsburgh is not even an archdiocese, but in the Byzantine Rite, Pittsburgh is the seat of an archeparchy covering eleven states.
A typical Observatory Hill house on Riverview Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s most attractive streets.
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Same Rowhouses, Two Different Cameras
The same two houses on 40th street in Lawrenceville across from Arsenal Park, taken in 1999 with two different twin-lens-reflex cameras. Above, a Lubitel, a Russian camera with a plastic body but a decent lens and all the usual manual controls. Below, an Imperial, the sort of thing photographers call a toy camera: a cheap old plastic fixed-focus camera that takes 620 film.
The house on the left has had its Gothic peak restored since this picture was taken.
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Mount Lebanon Cemetery Office
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Carved Stoop on the South Side
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Terra-Cotta Head
This terra-cotta head of a helmeted allegorical figure (the flowing hair suggests femininity, but the armor suggests “don’t mess with me”) is really a first-rate piece of work, which makes it all the more surprising to find it built into the gable of a rowhouse on the South Side. It is the sort of ornament you add to tell your neighbors, “I am slightly more prosperous than you, because I can afford to have this built into my gable.”
—Old Pa Pitt suspects that this is meant to be a head of Minerva, a Roman goddess you don’t mess with.
The other decorative details on this house are also fine, though more in a vernacular Victorian Romanesque style. This ornament is in the arch above the middle second-floor window.
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More Breezeways of the South Side
You might have thought one dose of breezeways would have been enough for such an esoteric subject, but you would have been mistaken. With his usual monomania, Father Pitt is building up a large collection of South Side breezeways, with plans to expand the collection into other neighborhoods soon.
Sometimes curious accidents happen to breezeways. For example:
This appears to be half a breezeway: the house on the left has been much altered, with its half of the shared breezeway filled in.
Here is a shared breezeway that has lost one of its houses, so that it has now become a curious lean-to construction on the side of the remaining house.
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Carved Brackets
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Breezeways of the South Side
This is certainly one of old Pa Pitt’s most esoteric subjects. In rowhouse neighborhoods, there are often tunnel-like passages through to the rear yard of a house, with the upper storeys built over the passage. These outdoor passages are called “breezeways” in Pittsburgh; in other cities they may be called gangways or alleys. Sometimes the passage runs through one house; sometimes it is shared by two houses. We see examples of both in this little collection.
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Front Doors of the South Side
The famous Victorian front doors of the South Side are featured on posters and in picture books on coffee tables all over western Pennsylvania. There is an endless variety to the woodwork on these South Side rowhouses. Old Pa Pitt was out walking on the South Side and decided to concentrate on doors: here is the collection he made in just half an hour’s stroll. Click on any picture to enlarge it.
Many of these doorways have decorative stained-glass transoms over the door, often with the address worked into the glass:
Of course, no collection of South Side front doors would be complete without a Kool Vent awning on an alley house:
