BLDGBLOG: Ancient Roads [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

BLDGBLOG has a new post up about "landscape hermeneutics" - the study and interpretation of urban landscapes- the discovery and reclamation of old roads.

Sounds right up our alley, so to speak.

Various Lots, Mostly Steep, Ostensibly Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

A hit and a miss on tonight's expedition. We took the car to Haworth Street, parked it, and ventured down the hill in search of remnants of the structures that were marked as there in 1939. Having made the trip before, we found it a pretty easy jaunt, and this time brought both light and camera.

We looked first for Lot 190, the house that would have been in Andoe Street's curve, had the street ever existed. After tramping through much spiny underbrush, we found, where it might have been, a long, flat clearing halfway down the hill. The soil was wet from recent rain, and a path seemed the path seemed to stop at the clearing and not continue further down. There were not a few broken beer bottles. Considering the view of the city from the clearing, this was not unnatural.

(Note: night is a bad time to take short-exposure digital pictures)

Below the clearing the hill fell straight off down towards Ivondale Street. How city planners might have projected putting three new streets up the side of that hill we could not conceive. We attempted to move south towards the other potential structure, but the underbrush hindered us bodily and did stab at us most dreadfully with its thorns. Rebuffed again we turned uphill and retraced our steps. But this time, by the light of our flashlight, we found a flight of steps, railings nonexistent, nearly covered by the hillside, suggesting that indeed there was at one point some kind of habitation on what might be called Andoe Street. Alternatively, if there was once more direct access to the Lost House above Ivondale, to the west, these steps might have been part of that system- perhaps it moved north down the hill along the theoretical Andoe, but switched back west at an appropriate elevation.

Then again, it may have served that last theoretical structure mentioned in our previous post, the structure on lot 183, east of Alexis. Looking southward from the half-sunken steps we could see a flat piece of ground down the hill, covered in water and reflecting the moonlight. The underbrush and bluff proved too great, however, and we dared not risk getting closer to it.

On our way back up towards the car we kept shining the flashlight downhill, looking for any sign of structure, but all we saw were trees and brush.

A few nights ago we found a house where one really shouldn't be, and tonight we found nothing where old sources said there was something. C'est la vie dans la bassin.

What is a paper street? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

In addition to being a story title, we have used the term "paper street" on more than a few occasions without actually defining it. A quick googling brings mostly references to Fight Club's Paper Street Soap Co, but no actual definitions. So here goes:

A paper street is a street, roadway, boulevard, path, etc. which only exists on maps or lists, in planning, development, or governmental offices, and not at all in real life.

In places that are not Pittsburgh, these streets are typically the result of a planned development of which only a few phases were implemented. The streets still exist legally as rights-of-way that cannot be built upon, but they are otherwise useless if one wishes to walk, bike, or drive them.

In Pittsburgh the definition gets a bit more complicated because the maps of real streets tend to themselves have errors or oddities without even bringing legal-construct-only streets into the mix. That is to say, so much of the city is built on hills and in valleys that maps might show two streets connecting when in fact one is a bridge sixty feet above the other; or they might show a street that seems to be a thoroughfare but is actually undrivable public steps for a few blocks before becoming pavement again. Something might be called a street, when it should be more accurately called a flight, or a span.

There are many paper streets in this town.

More metaphorically, Paper Street, capital P capital S, is that strange street which you turned on to once late at night and ended up two neighborhoods away without understanding how, or which took you up a hill and showed you downtown from an angle you thought impossible. It is the physical instantiation of everything weird about this town's geography. In the story of same name, the narrator encounters such a street, with disastrous consequences.

Finally, a street with a similar name, Paper Way, does exist in Pittsburgh, just north of Friendship Park. Expect a report from

Your obedient servant in the field,
James

Canton Avenue, Beechview [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

On Thursday night, my colleague and I decided to investigate the reports that Canton Avenue, in the Beechview neighbourhood of our fair city's South Hills, is the steepest municipal street in the world -- or at least in that part of the world which keeps such records.

Beginning, as ever, from our headquarters at the Junkshop in Squirrel Hill, we took the Parkway out as far as the Fort Pitt Tunnel and then struck south along Banksville Road. Coast Avenue, our connecting road, proved elusive, and we were obliged to come about in Dormont and retrace our steps. Our eyes discerned more clearly, and we turned onto Coast -- and were immediately foxed by its unexpected twisting as it climbed abruptly into the hills. Surprising, perhaps, but a good sign that our goal would be as steep as it was advertised to be.

And then, moments later, there it was, rising madly up to our left: Canton Avenue. Crazy, vertiginous, its sidewalk a ramshackle stairway, its road surface rough cobbles, it seemed by its very presence to forbid any effort to climb it.

James and I drew our breath deep, and I tromped on the gas pedal.

The car's engine roared in protest -- or in enthusiasm -- as we made our rattling way up. Canton Avenue is actually very short, for all its mountainous steepness, and the climb, though wild and exhilarating, was swiftly over. I pulled my vehicle to a stop and we clambered out onto the flat, allowing both ourselves and the car to recover.

Canton Avenue continues for another half-block beyond the crest of the hill; it was here that we parked. From this side, the edge is marked by a pair of DO NOT ENTER signs, which I was only too happy to obey -- though the temptation to throw caution flapping to the wind and trust luck and Providence to see ourselves through the pell-mell suicide run to the bottom rose up, inevitably, and had to be quashed. The rapture of the deeps.

James and I started down the stairs, which fall unevenly, long and short, on the east side of the street. Even their tread is angled somewhat, and where the steps are broken by driveways -- for a few brave souls in brave houses cling to this cobblestone cliff -- the concrete is crumbled and lies at ankle-trapping angles.

We ventured perforce onto the street itself. From above the washboard roughness of the stones gives them an almost stairlike aspect which we found slightly better footing than the sidewalk, though with no railing to catch at a stumble or trip would have had long, painful consequences. James was reminded of the crumbling terraces of Machu Picchu.

Perhaps halfway down -- though it was difficult to judge -- we found a patch of the street, roughly circular and perhaps ten or twelve feet across, so broken and cracked that it seemed as though mortar-fire had fallen on Canton Avenue. We poked cautiously
about it, careful of our balance, and were quietly thankful that it had not been necessary to drive across it on the climb.

At about this point our party doubled in size. My colleague's young lady-friend, together with an old friend of his, arrived at the bottom of the hill and, after some telephonic coaxing and reassurance, drove up -- with a flourish of gunned engine that I had to admire -- and joined us. There followed a bit of enjoyable clowning for the cameras' sake, and all together we marched back up to investigate what lay at the other end of the street.

A child's doll, lying limp and abandoned among the trash at curbside, caught our eyes. It was difficult at first to determine what it was meant to be: early theories, as we approached, included a headless Snow White, or even an actual dead creature. In fact it was a parrot, though the crude form of its head and body, the beak merely a yellow blob, made this difficult to determine. The sad scraps of the Pittsburgh Pirates jersey about its wings and midriff were they key and only clue to its origin and purpose.

Canton Avenue exists, on the maps, for only a block: it connects Coast Avenue, down the hill, with Hampshire Avenue, at its crest, and this is all. However, we found the corner of Canton and Hampshire marked not by house or woodlot but by a set of Jersey barriers, with vague darkness beyond.

As I have always found Jersey barriers an irresistible invitation to entry, I threaded through and found myself in the fine gravel and spindly weeds of an abandoned roadway. The street, plainly, had formerly run farther than Hampshire; indeed, the wires and telephone poles continued overhead towards the woods.

The four of us advanced down what remains of Old Canton Avenue. After a short distance it narrowed and was overshadowed by the encroaching trees. The street itself seemed to end -- or to have ended, I should say -- at some tarred timbers laid across it, with a small turnaround or parking area on the downhill side. Beyond, the remains of some open space, now largely consumed by undergrowth, and some sort of structure. I shone my penlight towards it.

A cage, of boards and heavy wire, lay burst and half-wrecked in the feeble light. It could not have been intended to hold any large animal -- indeed, it had something of a chicken-coop look -- and must have been decades abandoned, but finding it nevertheless gave us all a frisson. Trash and unidentifiable detritus lay about our feet, though not in anything like such quantities as we had found at the Lost House above Ivondale Street.

Clearly there must once have been a house here -- and we had in fact walked straight past it only moments before. Screened from view by darkness and vegetation, a few concrete pillars still stood above man-height just back from the old road, and behind them crumbling foundations of cement and fieldstone were a rectilinear gash in the hillside, half-filled with rubble. However old this scene may have been, it appeared a hundred times older to the eye: I felt as though we had disturbed the burying-mound of a Saxon king, or of some Scythian warlord who went to his rest draped in gold, with ten horses and a hundred maidens laid with him to ease his passage into the hereafter...

Connor's young lady espied a coal-scuttle, and I set my musings aside. These ruins were the only sign of any habitation along Old Canton Avenue; if ever there were other houses, the hillside and the forest have long since swallowed them. We may perhaps be given license to imagine some ancient resident, stubbornly clinging to home and address long after the city has bought and demolished all their neighbors in preparation for the shortening of Canton Avenue, prolonging the house's existence both as dwelling and as ruin far longer than any other -- but this is merely fancy, and it might well be that there was only ever one house there. The maps my colleague has lately uncovered in the University's library will tell us more.

The discovery of the ruined house placed a cap on the evening's investigations. There was little more to find that could match it for bulk, or foreboding, or surprise. I remarked to James that we kept finding ruined houses where we least expected them -- which should keep us expecting them, in the future!

We returned to our vehicles, said our cheerful adieus, and drove away through the steep dark streets of Beechview.

I have the honour to remain
Your obedient servant in the field,
Alan

What in the Hell is on Lot 190? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

The University of Pittsburgh runs an exceedingly good website full of historic Pittsburgh maps, and many of these maps include Four Mile Run.

Specifically, the GM Hopkins Company Map of Pittsburgh from 1939 shows in full detail the streets and structures of Lower Greenfield, including a structure exactly where the abandoned house we found was.

An image is here. (linked to and not simply displayed because of the magic of copyright law!)

The pertinent lot for us is lot 160, owned along with its neighbor 159 by the Keystone State Building and Loan Association, an organization now long out of business.

The L shaped structure on the map looks a lot like the house we found, and it looks far enough back from the road to be the very same.

Looking around the map, one might notice a planned extension of Boundary Street beyond where it ends at Ivondale, and a new street, Andoe Street, which would connect it to Haworth.

Haworth itself underwent some changes when Greenfield Elementary was built. Most of the road was vacated and effectively moved a hundred feet west, so that for the five houses at the end, the first house on the block suddenly became the last house on the block.

What interests us most, however are the two other structures build halfway down the hill. One is on Lot 190, at the crook of the facticious Andoe Street. There is a house shown on the map, apparently owned by one A.M. Bannon.

Just south of it on Lot 183 is a structure on A. and M. Rogan's land.

As far as we can extrapolate, the whole development was planned and sold, but once people realized just how steep the hills were, many lots were simply left alone forever.

My colleague and I feel that these vellum houses on paper streets might be worth a visit tonight.

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

Four Mile Run? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

My colleague and I tonight made a reconnaissance of Four Mile Run and its environs. A full report of the journey, and the weird marvels we encountered on the way, will be forthcoming.