We saw the movie version yesterday, and now here are two still pictures of the vigorously moving Saw Mill Run at Seldom Seen.
And here is a picture of the path leading toward the Arch and the railroad viaducts:
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Saw Mill Run at Seldom Seen
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Saw Mill Run After the Storms
Heavy rains left streams gushing and rivers overflowing. Go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page for an HD version.
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View Through the Seldom Seen Arch
Looking toward Saw Mill Run Boulevard.
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Seldom Seen Arch
The Wabash Railroad built this picturesque structure to carry its line over Saw Mill Run and the little lane that led back into the village of Seldom Seen.
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Archaeology in Saw Mill Run
Like many streams in the city, Saw Mill Run is full of debris. But it is very interesting debris. If you enlarge the picture, you can see bricks of multiple types, bits of glass, broken plates, and other evidence of the long-vanished village of Shalerville. For the urban archaeologist, Seldom Seen is a rich treasury.
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Drake Ducking
A mallard drake feeding in Saw Mill Run, Seldom Seen.
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Seldom Seen Arch in an Artsy Way
This was an attempt to make a modern digital photo look like a nineteenth-century art photograph. Note the rock climbers preparing to climb the stone wall.
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Celandine Carpet in Seldom Seen
Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna or Ranunculus ficaria) may be an invasive species, but it certainly makes the stream valleys gay in the spring.
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Urban Archaeology: The Hotel Henry
One never knows what may turn up at an old homesite. The Seldom Seen Greenway on the border of Beechview and Mount Washington is forest now, with Saw Mill Run gushing merrily through it. But Seldom Seen was a little village of its own once, and the old homesites are full of broken plates and bottles and other items of intense archaeological interest. Here is a plate from the Hotel Henry, once a grand hotel on Fifth Avenue, but torn down in the 1950s to make way for a modernist skyscraper. Was it bought or stolen from the hotel? We’ll never know.
The Historic Pittsburgh site has a good picture of the Hotel Henry as it appeared in about 1900.
Do you need a copy of the hotel’s logo in scalable form? Probably not, but old Pa Pitt has reconstructed it for you anyway:
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Reflections in the Seldom Seen Arch
Hypnotic patterns of sunlight reflected from the pool in Saw Mill Run on the bricks of the Seldom Seen Arch. Go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page to see the video in glorious HD-ish.
