An abstract sculpture in front of the Carnegie Museum of Art perfectly complements the mass of the Cathedral of Learning in the background. This photograph was taken a few years ago, when the Cathedral of Learning still proudly bore its coat of soot from the age of heavy industry.
A row of smokestacks from the vanished Homestead Works looms over a parking lot for the gigantic Waterfront shopping center that replaced the factories.
Until the 1890s, rowhouses were the characteristic housing of Pittsburgh, as they were in most large Northeastern cities. These elegant rowhouses on the South Side are among the last of the rowhouse era in Pittsburgh. Soon the well-to-do merchant classes who built these houses would begin to demand detached houses, even if they were detached by only two or three feet.
Flaming red Boston ivy covers the side wall of a house on the South Side.
A masterpiece of industrial architecture, the Kramer Building is a block long and beautifully proportioned. Each of the arches on the first floor is divided into two sub-arches, creating a pleasing and interesting rhythm that makes the building feel much less like a huge slab of brick. The neighborhood across the street is residential, and the building manages not to overwhelm the rowhouses facing it.
There is no need for explanation: just beautiful November colors in every shade.
So they say in Pittsburgh. This clock on the old Duquesne Brewery may or may not be the world’s largest, but it’s huge (compare it to the houses in the foreground). From across the Mon on the Boulevard of the Allies, it’s the most obvious thing on the South Side.
A break from fall in Mellon Park to take a walk on the South Side.
It’s the common pattern in the old rowhouse neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Alleys were built between the main streets to serve the backs of the houses. But then the real estate became so valuable that people sold their back yards, and houses sprung up along the alleys. Here on the South Side, impossibly narrow alleys are full of small houses, some making up in dignity what they lack in size, others more utilitarian.
What this niche really needs is a statue of Diana, or of some other chaste goddess who appreciates nature. Not one of those urban party-girl goddesses.
