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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Castle Shannon
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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.
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Hampshire Avenue, Beechview
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.
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Fourth Avenue
A view eastward on Fourth Avenue, one of the most architecturally interesting streetscapes in the world.
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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.
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Potomac Avenue, Dormont
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.
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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.
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The Wooden Street in Shadyside
Pittsburghers are used to bricks and Belgian blocks, and most people who walk on Ellsworth Avenue past the entrance to this absurdly narrow little street probably never notice that these blocks are made of wood.
Wood-block pavements were very common in the 1800s. The “Nicolson pavement”—a pavement of wood blocks soaked in creosote—had some advantages over stone: cobblestones were horribly uneven, and Belgian block is expensive and hard on horses’ feet. Wooden pavement does not stand up well to heavy vehicular traffic, however, and almost all the Nicolson pavements are gone. There is one in Philadelphia, one in Cleveland, a badly decayed one in St. Louis, and three in Chicago, according to the Wikipedia article. But Roslyn Place is the only remaining street in America paved from beginning to end with wood blocks—although, to be fair, the beginning and the end are not very far apart. Here, in a quiet dead-end court, the traffic is light, and the blocks last for decades before they have to be replaced. Since the street is a historic district, we can be fairly confident that they will always be replaced with wooden blocks, as they have been in the past.
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Looking North on Washington Road, Mount Lebanon
Mount Lebanon is what old Pa Pitt calls an urban suburb. It is outside the limits of the city of Pittsburgh, but otherwise the core of it is a city neighborhood, with an urban business district. (An urban business district, in Father Pitt’s definition, is one in which the businesses line up abutting the sidewalk, with no parking lots in front of them.) “Uptown” Mount Lebanon is a pleasant place for a stroll, with many restaurants and specialty shops to lure you off the sidewalk. And as we can see in this picture, it is actually one of the broadest urban business districts in the entire metropolitan area. In Washington, D.C., this would be merely average, but Pittsburgh has very few spaces that can accommodate a commercial street this wide.
