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.
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.
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.
Fall colors on the sidewalk of Jane Street.
Kosciusko Way, apparently named for the famous Polish hero of the Revolutionary War, is a narrow and crowded street that makes a brave attempt to go straight up from Josephine Street into the South Side Slopes, but makes it only a block before being utterly defeated by topography.
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.
Edwards Way is the very edge of the South Side Flats. The greenery-covered wall on the left is the stone retaining wall below the railroad that separates the Flats from the Slopes. Of course this tiny narrow space is nevertheless too valuable to leave unbuilt, so the free side of the alley is lined with typical South Side alley houses.
