Just walking upstairs in the main Carnegie Library is an aesthetic adventure.
The second-floor corridor. At the ends of the corridor are two cherub medallions, identical except for the motto.
Omne labore—“Everything with effort.”
Vivere est cogitare—“To live is to think,” as Cicero said.
The stairway from the Smithfield Street Bridge down into the Grand Concourse of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad station.
Stairways can be good opportunities for architects to show off, and here is a stairway designed by Henry Hornbostel that defies imitation.
Except on foot. This is Louisa Street in Oakland, a typical Pittsburgh street interrupted by a stairway.
This stairway at the end of 15th Street, South Side, takes pedestrians up to a bridge over the railroad, and then to a stairway up into the South Side Slopes.
Beechview’s streets are laid out in a grid. The topography rebels against grids, so streets are often interrupted for a block by stairways—as we see here on Andick Way. This is a very common phenomenon in Pittsburgh neighborhoods. The stairways appeared on published maps as streets, and in the early days of GPS that made navigation hazardous. Today most GPS systems have figured out which blocks are impassible to motor vehicles.
Like many hilltop neighborhoods, Mount Washington is full of streets that appear as streets on maps but turn out to be stairways. They made driving perilous in the early days of GPS navigation, but most navigation systems have learned to distinguish the stairways by now. Mann Street is three blocks long, and two of the three are stairways like this.
One of Pittsburgh’s distinctive features is the huge number of public stairways. Many streets that appear on maps are actually stairways, like Eleanor Street here. In the early days of GPS navigation, trip instructions would often send drivers up or down these streets; but most GPS systems have now learned to recognize the streets that can accommodate pedestrians only.
And bicycle cops. To be a Pittsburgh bicycle cop, you have to be able to ride down one of these stairways. If you are still alive at the bottom of it, you’re qualified.
Open Street Map does a good job of showing the public stairways on the South Side Slopes. All the denser red dotted lines are stairways. The narrower, sparser dotted lines are walkways.
