Carson Street on the South Side has our best collection of Victorian commercial buildings. For the second place, several neighborhood spine streets are in the running. Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield is one; Butler Street in Lawrenceville is another. But for variety and quality of Victorian architecture, old Pa Pitt might award the second place to East Ohio Street in Dutchtown.

This little house with storefront is probably one of the earliest buildings on the street. Italianate details like the brackets place it in the middle nineteenth century, but otherwise it is not much different from the houses that grew up in Pittsburgh and Allegheny from the moment we had access to bricks.

The contrast with the high-Victorian building next door is striking. This building must have looked frightfully modern in 1888. The next generation of architects would find it old-fashioned, because they had gone back to a more pedantically correct classicism.

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This ornate building was put up in the 1880s for an obviously prosperous grocer named F. Beckert, and that is as much as old Pa Pitt can tell you about it. Whoever drew the Ohio Street façade had a great deal of fun tracing angular intersecting lines. In fact those lines may be more clever than we realize at first glance: they disguise the asymmetry of the front. The left bay is wider than the other two, but because of the complexity of the patterns in the ornamentation, we read the building as symmetrical.

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Except for the new windows on the second floor, which look a bit staring but do at least seem to fit the holes they were made for, this building is unusually well preserved—a Victorian feast of ornaments of all types, applied lavishly but not without an eye for the overall effect.

The fact that the left half is a sort of narrower duplicate of the right half suggests that it was built as an addition when Mr. Hollander acquired the lot next door.

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