56th Street, Stanton Heights [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

On the southern bank of the Allegheny, the Strip District sets the tone for street layout: the parallel Liberty Ave and Penn Ave run from the Golden Triangle northeast, and the street numbers that start in the Cultural District continue their inexorable rise through the Strip and on into Lawrenceville. Liberty and Penn curve east and then south, but Butler picks up where they leave off, continuing the north-easterly axis from which the numbered streets dangle perpendicularly.

After Liberty and Penn fall away, Allegheny Cemetery cuts off Butler Street to the south. Lawrenceville narrows to just a few blocks between the river and the graveyard. Things open up a bit around 51st Street, but the land to the south has now rolled higher; curving up its face, Stanton Avenue edges the cemetery and leads into Stanton Heights.

The low areas around Butler Street still feel like Lawrenceville, a mix of ancient row houses and light industry, but the streets grow ragged as they hit the bluffs of Stanton Heights: 54th runs for sixteen short blocks from the river up the hill, but 55th runs just five or six. A hundred feet up and an eighth of a mile southeast, those streets reappear as short cross-streets in Stanton Heights, irregularly connecting Alford, Camelia, Price, and McCandless. These tiny reappearances of the numbered streets mimic their lowland counterparts, little echo corridors demarking phantom tollways that might run vertically up the hillside, connecting the two neighborhoods. 53rd, 54th, and 55th all have such echoes, as if one simply continued their straight Cartesian lines across the map without regard for geography, but only actually instantiated blocks of the street where it was physically practical.

And then we come to 56th Street, which, in addition to being broken up by the hillside into four distinct sections, connected in places only by the concrete staircases that Pittsburgh sometimes uses in place of street or sidewalk, further has the unique distinction of existing twice: running parallel to itself for a whole block.

Halfway up the hill, Duncan Street branches off Christopher, and from its end a little square loop of three more streets appears. One drives off of Christopher southwest down Duncan, passes 56th street, hits the end of the block and turns left onto... 56th street? Continuing on this strange extra 56th street, one hits a staircase that runs up the hill to Celadine Street, coming out just Northeast of the terminus of 55th1/2 Street (a two-block alley that connects three parallel streets and has no brother in the lowlands to the north). Turning left again, just before the stair, one is now on Wickliff Street. At the end of that block you are back at the first 56th street. Take a left and you arrive back at Duncan. Take a right and you dead-end a short half-block later at a sheer cliff face.

The more western 56th street lines up with the piece of 56th Street in the lowlands to the north. The more eastern one lines up with the 56th Street in Stanton Heights.

The stairs that run up the hill from the western block of 56th Street hit Celadine at something more like 55th and 5/8, judging by the length block of Celadine between 55th and 55th1/2.

It is as if the cartographer started the street from two sides, but just barely failed to make it meet itself in the middle, leaving instead a section of near-parallel, dangling overlap, two blocks of the same street a hundred feet apart.

The numbering system of these rogue blocks is not currently known, but an expedition is underway. Expect a report soon.

Yours,
James