Father Pitt

Tag: Streetscapes

  • Catenary

    Broadway in Beechview

    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.

  • Apartment Buildings on Academy Avenue, Mount Lebanon

    Apartment building

    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.

    Apartment building

  • Castle Shannon

    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.

    Trolley crossing Castle Shannon Boulevard

  • The Canyon

    Looking eastward on Fourth Avenue

    Looking eastward on Fourth Avenue from the intersection with Wood Street.

  • Broadway and Beechview Avenue, Beechview

    Broadway in 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.

    Storefronts on Beechview Avenue

    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.

  • Hampshire Avenue, Beechview

    Hampshire avenue

    Father Pitt is convinced that the developers who laid out the streets in Beechview had never visited the site. Just draw lines north-south and east-west on a map, and you have your streets. Hills? Oh, they can’t be that bad, can they?

    Here is Hampshire Avenue viewed from the Red Line streetcar crossing, with Broadway—where the Red Line crosses Hampshire again—at the top of the next hill.

  • Fourth Avenue

    Looking east on Fourth Avenue

    A view eastward on Fourth Avenue, one of the most architecturally interesting streetscapes in the world.

  • Brookline Boulevard

    Brookline Boulevard

    The Boulevard, as it’s known in the neighborhood, is Pittsburgh’s broadest commercial street—which strikes out-of-towners as absurd, but Pittsburgh has never been a city of broad streets. The breadth comes from the history of the street: when streetcars ran in Brookline, they ran in a separate right-of-way in what is now the middle of the street, with a narrow lane for automobiles on each side of the tracks—just like Broadway in Dormont today, where the Red Line cars still run. That history also accounts for the Boulevard’s other peculiarity: unlike most business streets, it has almost all the businesses lined up on one side of the street, with the other side more residential.

    In every way this is an eclectic street. There’s a high occupancy rate in the storefronts, but very few chains are here, giving the neighborhood an unusually rich collection of odd little one-off shops. The architecture is also eclectic: in one block we can see everything from the beginning of the twentieth century to twenty-first-century International Style revival.

  • Potomac Avenue, Dormont

    Potomac Avenue

    One of the most pleasant shopping streets in the South Hills, Potomac Avenue has a remarkable variety of things to do in a short space. There are coffeehouses, restaurants, an undivided neighborhood movie palace still showing movies, a wine shop, a bakery, a bookstore, a large and well-stocked Turkish-Russian grocery, an oriental-rug dealer, and a streetcar stop on the Red Line (Potomac) that makes it all accessible.

    The old Dormont Presbyterian Church (now North Way Christian Community) dominates the street in just the right way.

  • Fourth Avenue

    Fourth Avenue

    Some of the earliest skyscrapers sprouted on Fourth Avenue, which is an absurdly narrow street for towers like these. Since Pittsburgh never developed a setback rule like Chicago or New York, the towers go straight up, which accents the narrowness of the street even more.