Grandview Avenue on Mount Washington is the famous street-with-a-view in Pittsburgh, but the more pretentiously named Rue Grande Vue in Elliott has quite a view, too. Because Elliott is an out-of-the-way West End neighborhood that few Pittsburghers have even heard of, the houses here are modest and—by most standards—affordable.

The name of the street sounds like something a 1950s developer would come up with because you told him “Grandview Avenue” was taken, but in fact it seems to go back at least to the 1880s. It went through some strange permutations. An 1882 plat map shows it as “Rue Grande Vee,” which probably means somebody pronounced it in French and somebody else wrote down what he thought he heard. An 1890 plat map shows it as “Pine Grand Rue.” By the early 1900s, it was Rue Grande Vue in Chartiers Township (later taken into the city) and partly Pinerue and partly Rush Street in the section that had been taken into Pittsburgh. By 1910 the southeastern section was all Pinerue Avenue; the discontinuous northwestern section was still Rue Grande Vue. At some point the southeastern portion changed back to Rue Grande Vue, but the northwestern portion changed to Rudd Street, and old Pa Pitt has exhausted his patience and will not go looking for exactly when those things happened.

Although the street signs say “Rue Grande Vue,” most maps show the street as Rue Grande Vue Street, following the usual American custom of doubling foreign words we don’t understand.

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