Four Mile Run and its Environs, Ostensibly Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

The neighborhood just south of Schenley Park described in Paper Street is a real place, one to which Edmund and I took a late, late night visit just a few days previous. Herewith is our report, sans photographic evidence, unfortunately, as neither of us thought to bring a camera. In more recent endeavors, this lapse has been corrected.

The name of this particular neighborhood is contentious and inconsistent, and bears mention. It was the childhood home of Andy Warhol, and at that time was primarily composed of Rusyn immigrants (Rusyns are the people of the Subcarpathian Rus, a region to the north of Carpathian Mountains which today is divided between Poland and Ukraine) who came to work in the steel mills. They called it Ruska Dolina, Rusyn Valley.

The primary geographic component of the valley is the small stream that formed it, Four Mile Run. This stream also lends the neighborhood its official name, as well as the name of the one of the two main streets.

The other main street, Saline St, lends its name too. Most notably, the official church records refer to the area as Saline Parish.

Finally, as the neighborhood sits just down the hill from Greenfield, and indeed the only access road leads into the rest of Greenfield, the valley is sometimes called Lower Greenfield, to differentiate it from its more skyward neighbors to the south-east.

As mentioned above, the primary streets are Four Mile Run and Saline Street. They run east-west, as does Highway 376, which curves away from the river and runs up Rusyn Valley all the way to the Squirrel Hill Tunnels, another half-mile further than the end of Saline Street. The highway is six lanes wide, and soars 86 feet above the base of the valley, sheltering whole houses under its steel span. Another bridge crosses the valley north-south, Swinburne Street. The Swinburne bridge crosses from Greenfield Ave in Upper Greenfield into South Oakland, spanning over the Saline neighborhood, and then on the far side of the hill over a CSX rail line. This rail line actually lies under both bridges- cars over cars over locomotive.

Half way up the valley is Four Mile Run's most visible architectural landmark, the towering bulk of the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, Mr. Warhol's childhood parish. It is here that our journey started.

St. John Chrysostom is set back into the hill such that its street face is about thirty feet below its rear parking area. Stairs climb from Saline Street past the church's west side and up the hill. After about fifty steps the stairs branch. A short section climbs west, connecting to the tail end of Ivondale Street, a road which will be important later in the narrative. We did not take this branch, nor did we take the branch down into the church parking lot, and instead continued our march south, the stairs jutting up and through an overgrown ravine for hundreds of steps. Not a few of the concrete steps were broken or missing. To one side of the stairway I found, as Edmund had entirely failed to see it, the broken remains of a barrier reading "Steps Closed".

Out of the light snow and tree cover, we could suddenly see the dark bulk of a great brick building. It was of the asylum-or-apartment variety, rather than the factory-or-office kind. As we found upon completing our ascent, this was the unlit backside of Greenfield Elementary, a K-8 public school.

We took a look around the school's campus and the neighboring campus of St. Rosalia's Church, School, and Convent, and arrived at Greenfield Avenue. Taking the it west we walked past the edge of the Parish and started down the side of the hill. We knew that if we continued, we would eventually meet the end of Saline Street and return via the floor of the Run, but we preferred to seek another set of stairs down into the valley, cousins of those we had just climbed.

In pursuit of this we turned north from Greenfield up a small lane called Haworth Street, which wound along the top of the hill behind and below the intramural fields of Greenfield Elementary. Finding it at first entirely empty, Edmund wondered aloud why such a street even existed, until we turned the corner of the hill and saw the three houses it served. None of these houses abutted anything resembling the stairs we were looking for. Retracing our steps, I noticed that when Haworth turned to the east from its formerly northern direction, there seemed to be a few pylons blocking what might be more road.

Walking down this unbeaten path we moved north-west, our feet tramping from mud and old asphalt to big flat granite and shale. As we descended the slope not only did the presumed road deteriorate quickly into forested hillside, it also began to switchback and move more generally eastward, becoming in the space of a few steps no more than a vaguely defined track in the woods.

One should note at this point that our most ample light source was the moon, with Edmund's penlight a distant second. It was snowing, although we mostly felt that weather in the form of a coat of cold wetness that covered everything we touched. We made our way east, hoping the path would drop further down the hill and perhaps connect to Ivondale street, whose streetlights we could see distantly down through the trees below us.

And then we came upon a mattress. And a refrigerator. And an air conditioning unit. And a house. A house exactly where a house shouldn't be -- with no sidewalk, no driveway, no road, no access of any kind, halfway down a steep hillside. Its yard was a trash heap, its windows dark and broken. Its front door was ajar. We could not go around its uphill face, for it leaned against ten feet of bluff which we were now distinctly below. It's northern, downslope face, however, had a stone plinth that we walked over to reach its eastern yard, a larger, more jagged trash heap.

At this point we could clearly see Ivondale Street. We were perhaps sixty feet south of, and sixty feet higher than the road. Two houses stood below us, and although they rose from street-side almost four stories each, we were well above their rooflines. And although the backs of the houses were at least a story-and-a-half higher than their fronts, we were still well above and behind them.

The hill at this point became mostly bluff; any trace of path proved to be illusory. There were what looked at first to be stone stairs but were actually nothing but unstable, loose boulders drenched in mud and melted snow.

Seeing no way down to Ivondale, and no easy manner of continuing east to try to find another path down, we turned back.

A brief exploration, on Edmund's part, of the hillside to the west of the strange abandoned end of Haworth proved equally fruitless, at least in the dark and damp of night. We made our way back up the hill and returned to Greenfield Avenue.

A few hundred feet down from Haworth, past a car wash and a billboard, we came to the stairs we guessed existed, seven or eight landings, a descent vertically of perhaps sixty feet and horizontally of perhaps a hundred. These took us to the top end of Alexis street, which in turn sailed us northwest straight down to Saline Street. We were back in the Run.

As we walked down Alexis we passed all manner of strange, wonderful old houses. They proved fine examples of the old Pittsburgh type: dark ancient brick, vines growing about, heavy front porches, set back some feet from the road, windows so dark the houses might have been abandoned, bricks so unpointed and old that no angle was the same and no line was quite straight. One house in particular stood altogether at strange angles: its wings rose to different heights, and its roof sagged; its north wall bulged dizzyingly, and torqued eye-bafflingly up from its foundation. Edmund and I both took some fright, especially as we could hear the faint sound of running water, and certain of the houses did much to channel that sound and increase its volume and echo.

Our return to Saline street was quite a comfort: our car was in sight, and the street lamps felt much brighter. We walked east then, back to our vehicle and the Church.

Envehicled, we drove up the steep southern tail of Boundary Street and turned on to Ivondale, to get a closer look at the street we could not access from above. The houses came right up to the edge of the street, there was no sidewalk to speak of, and one house appeared to have bolted its front yard directly to the metal barrier on the downhill side of the street: play equipment was strung-up out over the bluff with rope and wood. At one point the road had subsided so much to the downhill side that the metal barrier in fact hung over empty air.

Returning down Boundary Street we took it north up into Junction Hollow, the north-south valley mentioned in Paper Street. Boundary is so named as it was the old eastern boundary of the city. The street used to extend all the way up into Oakland, but now the middle half-mile is reduced to a bicycle path, part of the Eliza Furnace Trail. It crosses under the same CSX rail trestle that 376 and the Swinburne Bridge cross over a hundred feet away, and ends as a parking lot for a public recreation field. From its northern terminus a few abandoned houses could be half-glimpsed through the trees, and away up the hollow the lights of Oakland glimmered in the distance.

Our journey in the Run ended driving out Saline Street to Greenfield Ave, under the CSX rail line (which at that point begins to follow the Monongahela south and east), to Second Avenue. As we passed under Swinburne Street and the Swinburne bridge, we noticed that directly beneath Swinburne lay Frazier Street. This was strange as the road sign off of Greenfield Avenue calls the street that becomes the Swinburne Bridge, Frazier Street, while on the far side of the bridge the street is clearly labeled Swinburne. Depending on where the higher end of Frazier street becomes Swinburne street, Frazier might actually lay on top of itself.

Second Avenue, which runs between the Monongahela and the CSX rail line and parallel to both, seems to have its south-eastern terminus in a padlocked gate and a huge pool of water just past it's intersection with Greenfield Avenue. This is in fact a lie. After swerving to the northern side of the train tracks, it goes under the name Irvine Street for a good mile before returning to the name Second at its intersection with Hazelwood Avenue.

Beyond those padlocked gates the old Second Avenue does continue, but not for public consumption, as it is the main access road for a series of former industrial brownfields which are now Pittsburgh's semi-classified "Robot City." This part of Second Avenue terminates when the rail line swings closer to the river. Irvine swings as well, and soon becomes Second Avenue again.

While driving along the many-named Second/Irvine, we noticed two sets of stairs, both abandoned, which had a bridge (or in the second case used to have a bridge) over the road. These merit further investigation.

Remaining your obedient servant in the field,
Connor