Father Pitt

Tag: ruins

  • St. Michael’s Mädchen Schule, South Side Slopes

    St. Michael’s Mädchen Schule

    Like many ethnic churches, St. Michael’s, a German Catholic church on the South Side Slopes, was the center of a whole village of ethnic institutions. This was a German girls’ school. The building will eventually disappear, but it has sat in this decrepit state for many years now. You can find photographs on line of the wreckage of the once-magnificent interior; old Pa Pitt is not enough of an urban adventurer to risk trespassing charges and serious injury to bring you such pictures himself.

    St. Michael’s Girls’ School

    Perhaps in an expensive neighborhood this building would find a use, but this neighborhood is not likely to become expensive enough to repay the several million dollars it would probably cost to rescue a school of this size.

    Entrance
    Inscription
    St. Michael’s Girls’ School

    Curiously, the girl’s school was much larger and more magnificent than the boys’ school. That building, next door, was clumsily and unsympathetically converted to apartments some years ago; the conversion itself is already showing its age.

    St. Michael’s Boys’ School
    St. Michael’s Boys’ School.

  • Knoxville Christian Church

    Knoxville Christian Church

    Unlike its neighbor, the Knoxville Presbyterian Church, this little Gothic church has no one to cut down the weeds and the Pittsburgh palms. It is already half-swallowed by jungle, and it may soon be nothing more than a roughly cube-shaped lump of vegetation. Wouldn’t it make a fine studio for some ambitious artist?

  • Skeleton of a Railroad Overpass

    At the back of the South Side, where the Flats meet the Slopes, two railroads once ran above the level of the streets. One is still one of the busiest rail lines in the city. The other has been abandoned, leaving rusty skeletons like this. In dreamy moods, old Pa Pitt likes to imagine how this right-of-way—only three short blocks from Carson Street—could be repurposed for a South Side El that would connect to the subway at Station Square.

  • Urban Archaeology in Emerald View Park

    Emerald View Park is a catch-all name for a string of parks ringing Mount Washington. In the section off Greenleaf Street are many remnants of at least one old house and some other constructions. Since old plat maps show nothing precisely here, this may have been dumped debris from a demolition nearby. Now the forest is taking over, but sections of brick wall and tile floor make surreal additions to the woodland scene.


    Map

  • Along the Tom the Tinker Trail

    The Tom the Tinker Trail runs beside a gurgling stream through a narrow valley in the Kane Woods Nature Area. The trail is named for a fictional character in the Whiskey Rebellion: farmers who paid the whiskey tax would receive threatening notes signed “Tom the Tinker.”

    Yes, there is a manhole cover in the middle of this idyllic scene. A sewer line runs down the hill through the stream valley.

    All through the woods we can see evidence that there was once a little community tucked into this narrow valley. Above, a ruined foundation clings to the side of the gorge.

  • Abandoned Homesite in the Woods

    A long-abandoned homesite in the Kane Woods Nature Area in Scott Township. You can recognize it by the ornamental plantings now run wild—or, if not, the crumbling steps are a dead giveaway.

  • Urban Archaeology

    Mysteries abound in a city when it’s had two and a half centuries to accumulate them. This old foundation in West End Park  has obviously been here for a while. How old is it? The land for the park was bought in 1875; was this a little farmhouse from before that time? Father Pitt would be happy to hear from anyone who knows more about the history of this structure.