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Strawberry Way
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Brereton Street, Polish Hill
Brereton Street was the commercial spine of Polish Hill. A few businesses still straggle along here, and the streetscape itself is one of those only-in-Pittsburgh sights: tall, narrow little buildings crowded on an improbably steep hillside, leading to a massive Renaissance church the size of a cathedral—Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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Street Interrupted, Part 2
An out-of-towner might think that some horrible territorial war had happened to make Beechview residents throw a concrete wall right across the middle of Sebring Avenue. But the culprit is topography again. The streets in Beechview are laid out in a grid in defiance of the hills, and the only way to make Sebring Avenue intersect Westfield Street was with terracing.
We’ve seen terraces like these on the South Side Slopes, and here is a similar construction for a similar reason in Beechview. As you might guess from the parked cars, the street is two ways on both sides of the divide, which only adds to the delightful confusion. You can turn any which way from Sebring Avenue. The only thing you can’t do is continue on Sebring Avenue.
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Street Interrupted, Part 1
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.
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Broadway Streetscape, Beechview
This view of the west side of Broadway in Beechview shows us a very Pittsburghish commercial district. The architecture is miscellaneous, including apartment buildings, commercial buildings, houses with storefront extensions, and tiny one-storey gap-filler storefronts. The street curves, so the buildings are not all perfectly rectangular. And of course this is Pittsburgh, so the whole row is on what in other cities would be called a steep slope, though in Pittsburgh we expect the Red Line streetcars to negotiate it.
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Catenary
It used to be a common sight all over the city: “catenary,” the complex assembly of wires hanging over the street to power the streetcars. The complexity comes from the necessity of keeping the wires that actually provide power almost straight (so that the pantograph on the trolley is always touching them), which can be done only by bracing them and pulling them from all directions.
The only long sections of live street trackage left in Pittsburgh are Broadway in Beechview, seen here, and the Brown Line, which is not in regular service but takes the other lines over Mount Washington (via Warrington and Arlington Avenues) when the Transit Tunnel is closed for maintenance. There you can still examine live catenary and marvel at the geometry of it.
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Apartment Buildings on Academy Avenue, Mount Lebanon
Academy Avenue in Mount Lebanon, just off the Uptown business district, is a street of small to medium-sized apartment buildings, giving way to single-family houses as the street gets farther from Washington Road.
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Castle Shannon
The center of Castle Shannon is the intersection of Castle Shannon Boulevard and Willow Avenue, which carries the trolley line. The only way to get a good visual impression of this oddly shaped business district is with a series of broad panoramas.
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The Canyon
Looking eastward on Fourth Avenue from the intersection with Wood Street.
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Broadway and Beechview Avenue, Beechview
Beechview is something unique in Pittsburgh and very rare in the United States: an early-twentieth-century streetcar suburb where the streetcars still run down the main street as they did when the neighborhood was first laid out. The central business district has had its ups and downs; right now it is a good place to find interesting little ethnic restaurants and groceries. Most of the neighborhood is laid out as a grid in spite of the precipitous hills, but Broadway, the street with the car line, follows the top of the ridge. Beechview Avenue (below) continues the straight line of the business district as Broadway curves off toward the Fallowfield streetcar viaduct and abruptly ends at Fallowfield Avenue, leaving the streetcars to continue on their own right-of-way.
Following the ancient tradition that the street with the tracks belongs to the streetcar company, the Port Authority is responsible for maintaining Broadway.
Streetcar service in Beechview is interrupted right now because the Saw Mill Run viaduct has been closed for emergency repairs. The Red Line will roll up Broadway again as soon as the bridge reopens.
