Father Pitt

Tag: Sarah Street

  • South Side Presbyterian Church

    South Side Presbyterian Church

    This church at the corner of Sarah and 20th Streets is a good example of a curious phenomenon in old city churches: the sanctuary is on the second floor, with the first floor devoted to meeting halls, classrooms, and offices. This is a common adaptation to very small lots in very crowded neighborhoods like the South Side. Note the difference in brick color along the side wall: the front of the church, with its impressive tower, was a later addition to a more ordinary-looking Presbyterian meeting house.

  • Morse School

    Now part of the Morse Gardens apartments, this fine-looking 1874 school was designed by T. D. Evans, about whom old Pa Pitt knows nothing else. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

  • 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.

  • Fall on Sarah Street

    Fall colors persist far into November in the city, though the trees in the suburbs are mostly naked twigs by now.

  • A Stroll Down Sarah Street

    Sarah Street is the most splendid residential street in the New Birmingham section of the South Side—the part from 17th Street eastward that was developed after the Civil War. “Splendid” is relative, of course: even the richest parts of the South Side were not millionaires’ neighborhoods. But there are many fine and substantial Victorian rowhouses on Sarah.

    Although Carson Street is the commercial spine of the South Side, commercial buildings also sprouted on the back streets, and Sarah Street has some good Victorian commercial architecture. Some of the buildings are still backstreet bars or stores; others have had their ground floors turned into apartments.

  • A Passage Between Houses, South Side

    Often in Pittsburgh rowhouse neighborhoods there are narrow, tunnel-like passages between the houses that run from the street into the back yards. This one struck old Pa Pitt as especially picturesque and a bit mysterious.

    Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.

  • South Side Presbyterian Church

    To Father Pitt’s eyes, the remarkable thing about the interior of this church is how Presbyterian it looks. Later Presbyterian churches in Pittsburgh are Gothic cathedrals, or miniature versions for smaller congregations, since the Presbyterians were overwhelmingly the moneyed class in the late 1800s; but this church was built in 1869, and retains the flat-ceilinged simplicity of traditional Presbyterianism. As in several of our churches in crowded city neighborhoods, the sanctuary is on the second floor, reached by either of a pair of flights of stairs in the front (one with an elevator chair for those who need it); the ground floor is the social hall and other rooms. The front was part of an expansion in 1893, built to a grander and wealthier taste.