Father Pitt

Tag: Street Signs

  • Two Hotels in Sharpsburg

    Lafayette Hotel

    Sharpsburg has a paucity of street names and has to double up on many of them. At the western end of the borough, Main Street splits into two Main Streets. On South Main Street we find two similar hotels from the 1890s, both in the kind of German classical-Romanesque hybrid style that old Pa Pitt has learned to call Rundbogenstil. “Hotel” meant “neighborhood bar with rooms for rent”; such hotels popped up in neighborhoods everywhere in our area, because it was much easier to get a liquor license for a hotel than for a bar.

    First, the Lafayette Hotel (probably not its original name), which not only still has a lively and beloved bar on the ground floor, but even still has rooms for rent.

    Entrance
    96 on the date stone

    The date stone: built in 1896.

    H in a decoration

    This probably tells us the initial of the original name of the hotel.

    Stained glass

    An oval stained-glass window.

    A block away, we have the Sharpsburger Hotel, now apartments.

    Sharpsburger hotel
    1893 on the date stone

    Built in 1893.

    Fourth St. street sign on the side of the building

    A bit of Romanesque carved foliage and a street sign that probably dates from the 1890s. Old Pa Pitt is collecting old street signs on the sides of buildings, by the way, which was the usual place for them in the 1800s. Both these hotels retain their corner signs.

    Sharpsburger Hotel

  • Concrete Street Signs

    From the Engineering News for July 6, 1916. Father Pitt knows of no such signs remaining in the city, but he would be delighted to have any remnants pointed out to him.

    Concrete Street Signs

    The use of concrete as material for constructing streetname signs is novel at the present time, but it has proved practicable. Two such signs are shown in Fig. 9. These were designed and installed recently by the Department of Public Works of Pittsburgh. Both post and signboard are of granite-finished concrete. The design shown at the left is modified as a Lincoln Highway marker. The signplates are separate from the post, being so constructed that they swing about a vertical axis and may be clamped at any desired angle. The letters, of a black cement composition of permanent color, are about ⅜ in. thick and dovetailed securely into the concrete of the background.