Construction on Panther Hollow Road Appears to be Over [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Looks all new and patched and shiny, too!

Panther Hollow Road is Under Construction! [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

In Schenley Park, the main drag, Panther Hollow Road, is being rebuilt.


I knew there was trouble when some time over the summer, jersey barriers appeared in the northern (westbound) emergency lane, routing pedestrian traffic around a bad section of sidewalk that used to have a metal guard rail, as the hill down into Panther Hollow is quite steep there. Before the Jersey Barriers were up, that sidewalk looked like this:

In mid-September, the Jersey Barriers expanded again, taking over the whole north (westbound) side of the road- both lanes- for a few hundred feet. More barriers were erected to squeeze the eastbound traffic down to one lane (the southmost of the four lanes) and squeeze the westbound traffic across the double-yellow-line over into the second-most-southern lane, which usually is the fast east-bound-lane.

As far as we can tell, the whole sidewalk and north-most lane collapsed and started sliding down the hillside, and the construction crews are there to repair and replace that part of the hill with stronger soil- probably gravel, so that Panther Hollow Road stops trying to sink into its namesake.

A few days ago we photographed the whole thing as we drove through it. Enjoy the Aphilotus-o-mation!

The Mysterious House of Lot 190, Lower Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Bing! came through, for once, and has an aerial photograph of the house.

Pittsburgh knows Kung Fu! Or so I though. [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

I thought Pittsburgh had a Black Belt, until I talked to our other contributor, Edward.

Let me explain.

Having just moved back to Pittsburgh from California exile, I am, well, excited. My fiancee and I are madly scrambling to furnish our new apartment, and so we have been driving all over the city, which has lead us down some interesting roads.

We did a lot of driving, and we passed a lot of Belt signs. The belt system is an innovation Pittsburgh made in the 1940s, developed by local traffic engineer Joseph White. They are collections of connected roads which, when followed in sequence, form long circular ring-roads, or belts, around Pittsburgh, in leiu of and then as alternatives to interstate highways.

The system looks something like this:


(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

And the belt signs look something like this:
(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

A few interesting points about the Belt system:
Roads that are belts retain their origional names. So, for example, there are signs on Shady Ave in Squirell Hill that it is Shady Ave, but also that part of it is the "Blue Belt"

The Highland Park Bridge is the only double-belted road, being for its span the carrier of both Blue and Green

The Green, Orange and Red belts are not complete circles- the Red Belt especially, as it is only that northern arc from Leetsdale to Tarentum. The Red and Orange belts cut off at the edges of the county (though Orange does continue unofficially, twelve miles of it being decomissioned in the 1970s, which gives me some exploratory notions), while the Green belt runs into a number of geographic issues (The western hills in Robinson township, for the most part), which make continuing its arcing curve prohibitive and/or trite.

The belts are arranged concentrically, and labeled after the colors of the light spectrum- Red at the edge, down through Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue to Purple (Purple was of course added in 1995 to try to help lost tourists in our lovely double-gridded downtown).

Imagine my surprise, then, when on Penn Ave headed north through Wilkinsburgh, well inside the yellow belt's purview, I came upon these signs:
The first time I came upon them I did not really notice them, save for the abstract notions which wiggled into my brain that a) some tiny extra piece of the Red Belt ran through Wilkinsburgh, and had its own detour and b) the Black Belt existed, and also had a small detour on Penn.

This lead to some confusion, when I mentioned a week later to Edmund that I had traveled along the Black Belt while picking up furniture, to which he replied "What? There is no Black Belt. Though if there was, Paper Street would be part of it."

And so just this morning I googled "Pittsburgh black detour" and found that others had been confused as well.

According to this March 2008 article in the Trib, the detours are color-coded designatory overlays (just like the Belt System) designed to route traffic away and around really bad accidents on the various parkways (just like the Belt System), and that the detours are colored Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Black, and Brown (the first four of which are also colors represented in the Belt System).

More confusingly, according to the Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways document revised and rereleased by Penn-Dot in 2008, there is not just one Black Detour, but thirty-eight, and not just one Red Detour, but twenty.

I am not sure if any same-color detours actually intersect each other, as the document is 210 pages long (it can be found as an 8 MB pdf here), but I am tempted to try to find out.

At the very least, I did find the two detours that the specific signs we found (On Penn near Ardmore) actually reference
RED DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 116)
BLACK DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 124)
They detours, then, split at Penn and Swissvale, Black heading further down Penn, and Red turning right on Swissvale.

Adding to the confusion, though (and perhaps explaining part of why two clearly different road systems managed to get mostly the same color scheme), is that in the above maps, pulled straight from the EDRFLAF document, RED is colored BLUE, and BLACK is colored RED.

Looks like Penn-Dot could use some better in-house graphic designers. They might want to take a cue from the brilliant Pittsburgh Wayfinder System, which... was also a Penn-Dot project, as far as I can tell.

Oh well.

Green Goddess [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

I just made Rigel and myself an excellent salad from Jesse Ziff Cool's "Simply Organic" cookbook using the wealth of organic produce one can find in San Francisco. It was her "Green Goddess Chicken and Asparagus Salad"

Green Goddess is actually a dressing. I had never heard of it, but before Ranch Dressing was invented it was supposedly the most popular salad dressing in the country.

From the Wikipedia article:

The dressing is named for its green tint. The most accepted theory regarding its origins points to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1923, when the hotel's executive chef wanted something to pay tribute to actor George Arliss and his hit play, The Green Goddess.[1] He then concocted this dressing, which, like the play, became a hit. This dressing is a variation of a dressing originated in France by a Chef to Louis XIII who made a Sauce Au Vert (Green Sauce) which was traditionally served with 'Green Eel' - Refer to Larousse Gastronomique Page 1272.

Just yesterday we walked past the Palace Hotel. Turns out Andrew Carnegie actually stayed there. Here's his description:

A palace truly! Where shall we find its equal? Windsor Hotel, good-bye! you must yield the palm to your great Western rival, as far as structure goes, though in all other respects you may keep the foremost place. There is no other hotel building in the world equal to this. The court of the Grand at Paris is poor compared to that of the Palace. Its general effect at night, when brilliantly lighted, is superb; its furniture, rooms and appointments are all fine, but then it tells you all over it was built to "whip all creation," and the millions of its lucky owner enabled him to triumph.

Also, the salad was really good. Rigel hates plants, and she liked this salad.

San Francisco- Adorable Crustations, Typography [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Tanked with other crabs at one of the stores in the recently re-interiored Ferry Building.



Crazily kerned characters keep trolley cars from crushing the curious (if cues are continued upon).

Bates, Juliet, and Romeo Streets; South Oakland [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Note: Some of this article is supposition, and is noted as such.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the area which is now South Oakland was owned by a woman named Juliet Simple. Juliet Street is presumably named after her. Later as more streets were built, presumably, the naming trend continued, but rather than pull from the names within Ms. Simple's family, "Juliet" was taken to be a Shakespeare reference, and so one now finds Hamlet, Ophelia, Juliet, and Romeo Streets in the vicinity. Or so I presume from the cartological records I came across.

Juliet is a relatively flat street that runs close to North-South. To the west the land falls down into a short valley that was once called Three Mile Run (after the creek that formed it, which entered the Monongahela three miles from the Point (see Four Mile Run, Nine Mile Run for further use of this creative naming scheme), but after the Democrat publisher of the "Tree of Liberty" newspaper, Tarleton Bates, who was killed there in a duel on January 8th, 1806, the name was changed. He was slain by Thomas Stewart, an Irish shopkeeper who was friends with Ephraim Pentland, Bates' rival, the Republican publisher of "The Commonwealth."

In that paper, Pentland called Bates one of the "most abandoned political miscreants that ever disgraced a State." Bates responded by purchasing a whip and attacking Pentland in the street some days later. Pentland challenged Bates to a duel via Stewart, who served as messenger. Dueling, however, had been outlawed since 1794. Bates declined, and then subsequently published an account of the whole incident, in which he accused Stewart of being "ungentlemenly" simply for being the messenger. Stewart called for an apology, and when none was given challenged Bates himself. Bates accepted the challenge.

One cold winter morning they boated out to Oakland, then wooded and far from the town, and finding a glade half way up Three Mile Run, proceeded to duel. William Wilkins, the lawyer after whom Wilkinsburg is named, served as Stewart's second. Morgan Neville, son of the colonel for whom the street is named, was Bates' second. Pistols were drawn, paces marched, and facing each other, shots were fired in unison. The first round, both parties missed. The second round, Bates was struck in the chest. He died within the hour. The duel was the last one Pittsburgh would ever see.

Since then, the glade has been paved over, and the valley mostly filled, but the name remains.

On the side of the valley, west and uphill from Bates, east and downhill from Juliet, lies her lover, Romeo Street. It is hard to call it a street, however, because it is in fact a set of stairs. Four houses line the staircase, all of them with their own sub-staircases leading down to their respective doors. Three of them were built some time before 1906, and the fourth some time between 1914 and 1932.

They were most likely built, as were many of the houses in the area, as housing for the workers at the Linden Steel Corporation. The plant employed 1500 Linden steel was owned by WJ Lewis and his son, WJ Lewis Junior. In the 1890s they were embroiled in a massive fraud incident. Apparently one of their employees had made a copy of the official inspector's seal used on steel that had been certified to a certain quality. Substandard steel was being stamped with this fake stamp and sent on as certified, full price steel. The subterfuge might not have been detected, save that one of Linden's chief customers was the US Navy, who had their own set of inspectors. Indeed, during the 1880s and 90s they sold more steel to the Navy than the Carnegie Corporation did.

WJ Lewis Jr. sold Linden Steel some time before 1901, sold his mansion on Chatsworth Avenue in Hazelwood, which was apparently a bit of a "Millionaire's Row" back in the 1880s, and moved to Texas. The mansion and grounds were sold to the city, which turned them into a community center and a now-gone park.

But I digress. The three houses and one wreck that stand today on Romeo street appear to have the same overhead plans as the houses on the 1932 map- they are probably original. They are, I believe, the most extreme examples of the city's tendency to fill ever nook and cranny it can, a testament (and tenement, if one will pardon the pun (or parole it)) to the will to expand, to fill.

Moleskine Zombie Prep page [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Crossposted to skine.art

UP...C? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the US Steel Tower (the worlds tallest triangular-floor-plan building) its headquarters a few months ago. They got permission to put their logo at the top of the building.

I just took a picture of that logo today. The M is missing- did it fall? I called the building's lobby and was told that no, it is simply a larger letter, and its installation was saved for last.

Macrotypographers, beware?

I want to make a kerning joke, but I sans serif.

The Zombiemobile and Eve, of the Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Since time before time (and by that I mean the early 1970s), Pittsburgh has been a town of zombies. More recently, one can see a beat up red little car around town, upon whose sides is stenciled the seal of the City of Pittsburgh, and the words "PITTSBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ZOMBIE DISPOSAL"

I recently interviewed Eve, the owner of the vehicle, at her place of employment, Heads Together, Squirrel Hill's last independent video rental store.

"Part of its just to entertain people in traffic," she thinks. "Like there's a suburban mom who's really frustrated and she sees my car with the zombie in the back and goes 'Oh, thats lovely!' "

Eve was born in Pittsburgh, and has lived here her whole life. She's known about zombies for just as long. She attributes her interest in zombies to George Romero's many zombie films, especially Dawn of the Dead, filmed locally at the Monroeville Mall. All of Romero's zombie films were filmed in and around Pittsburgh, and the most recent one (Land of the Dead) took explicit advantage of Pittsburgh's geography in its plot- the Golden Triangle has returned to being a fort- its rivers serve as barriers against the zombie threat.

Eve gave me a brief history of zombie lore in America and Hollywood.

"My friend Greg who works over at the Warhol was in Haiti in the peace corps for a couple of years. He was in this small village, and people were dead serious, they told him not to go near this one guy because he was a zombie. He was just this slow lumbering kind of guy in the village. There's a whole thing in the Hattian religion where you get turned into a zombie when a Bokor (sorcerer or shaman) blows pufferfish powder on you. You go into a coma, get a fair amount of brain damage, and he digs you up, and then you have to go work on his farm the rest of your life.

"That was pretty much how the zombie thing started out, a small piece of the Vodou religion, but then when Hollywood got a hold of it they started having magic zombies, and atomic zombies, and biological zombies. No going through the whole vodou or loa thing, we'll just have some guy cut up a chicken and then the zombies will come. If you watch "I Eat Your Skin", they almost get it right, but then it gets silly.

"Zombies didn't really start eating people until then. Before that, if you saw "White Zombie" with Bela Lugosi he's just kind of sad, and maybe he strangled people. But zombies didn't start eating people until the 60s or 70s.

I asked her about more recent films where biological viruses change humans and make them scary and zombie-like. Do the dark-seekers in I Am Legend count? Or the virus-ridden humans in the 28 Days Later series. Her answer was a clear no. "They are rage-infected humans, they aren't zombies. Zombies have to be dead and come back to life to qualify, however unlikely the circumstances that lead up to that."

She got a bit into the motifs and themes zombies might represent in movies. More recent ones cast them as the human output of a biological or chemical attack, but earlier films were more classist.

"There might be" Eve says, "a blue-collar connection, or maybe they are representative of slacker ner-do-wells. Zombies represent the masses- they're blue collar- they just keep going. It's like working on a fab-line. Mindless, repetitive action. I think anyone in the customer service industry can appreciate the zombie mentality."

These undead were the impetus for a group Halloween costume she and her friends put together a few years ago. They bought cheap jumpsuits and stenciled "Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal" on the back of them. Add improvised weapons to the mix (The crowbar is Eve's favorite) and the PDZD was born. "I think," she says "that if the PDZD were real they would be a cross between garbagemen and animal control."

A few weeks later, Eve took it upon herself to further stencil her car with the logo. At the time, it was a hunter blue geo prism. This "ZombieMobile Mark 1" was destroyed when it was rear-ended over on Schenley Hill. Mark 2 is the new red one, which she purchased from her mechanic.

Her car is part of a growing trend.

"I think that anyone in the know knows that Pittsburgh is the zombie city. I think right now there is a huge ressurgance in zombies- its a weird culture catching on. All the goths wanted to be vampires, but now they are okay with being less pretentious and emotional."

The big event every year is the zombie walk in the Monroeville Mall. Both this year and last year it made the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest zombie shuffle.

That walk and others are put on by local group The It's Alive! Show. Thousands of people show up in zombie costume, although the most creative zombie Eve has ever seen was one of the zombie bunnies her friend Beth has knit over the years.

When we spoke about the reaction of other municipal departments in Pittsburgh ("Ambulance drivers seem to get a chuckle. Garbage men get a kick out of it too!") the conversation shifted to how Pittsburgh's topography.

The post-industrial landscape makes a huge impact on the genre- most zombie/plague films have been set in Pittsburgh or post-industrial Scotland, a similar landscape.

"Pittsburgh and Scotland share a weird connection- apparently we both have the same slang. Metal industries and the Carnegie connection. Maybe he started it. "I've imported some bog mummies to work in the factories!" and then they busted loose."

She talked about other strange things in our city as well, including the Ogua- giant catfish that date back from Indian times in the three rivers.

"I used to boat around on the river, and I've seen some pretty big catfish. Like, you smack one with a paddle, and they start trying to rock the boat. There are also a lot of weird religious shrines in Pittsburgh: There used to be a huge Indian burial mound downtown, near the Blvd. of the Allies; to Hindu people the Point is hugely auspicious.

"But there's also the parkway Virgin Mary shrine, which is really nice. It seems like every culture that came here brought a lot with them. And then they got into competition- you'll go to a neighborhood and there will be 80 churches. St. Anthony's on Troy Hill has over 5000 relics and reliquaries.

"Taking three lefts here is never the same as taking one right. You end up four neighborhoods over right next to another church.

"Over at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh they are actually doing research on dogs right now where they pump all their fluids out and stop their hearts and then start them again. It was a Russian experiment in the 1940s, and they are trying it again."

Finally, I asked Eve how the PDZD disposes of the zombies it is called in to take away.

""If it's not too aggressive we might use a have-a-heart trap. We'd bait it with some head cheese. Then of course we would release the zombie into the wild of Monroeville, it's natural habitat behind the mall, where it can live free with its own kind. The zombies haven't been a big problem since the 70s. Its very rare that we have to put a zombie down. Decapitation is always a winner, but my preferred method is a crowbar to the cranial fissure there. And remember children, if you see a zombie, TELL AN ADULT!"

Harding Way, Polish Hill [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Harding Way climbs Polish Hill.

When I say that, I mean it- Harding way starts at the base of Polish Hill, where Herron Ave comes south off of Liberty. It starts as a set of steps that continue Herron's southern direction even as the road swings wildly east. Herron makes a steep U-turn to south, and then further up the hill turns west. Meanwhile, Harding way, at this point a flight of steps, meets the east-west street Dobson. Between Dobson and its southern parallel Fleetwood Way, Harding Way is a small, steep street. Then it becomes steps again, rising from Fleetwood Way up to Herron Avenue, which by this point has turned west. At Herron, again, it becomes a steep alleyway up the hill, past Bethoven Street. It ends abruptly at a wall, along whose side steps rise. At the top of these steps one is on the sidewalk of Bigelow Blvd.

Harding Way continues on the far side of Bigelow- it is a flight of steps to the poorly spelled Ridgway Street, and then slopes down the far side of Polish Hill, the Hill District, alternating again between roadway and steps every few blocks.

According to the Survey Maps of 1937, Harding Street was, well, a Street. It has right-of-way the size of a street, although even on the 1937 map it is staircase between Herron and Dobson, and between Herron and Bigelow. Apparently just at the North end of it a short way called Japan Way was planned- about three houses could be squeezed in to the space made by Herron Ave's hairpin turns. That street does not exist today- it's nothing but steep lot.
Betwen Herron and Bigelow, another short Way, Quarry Way, is on the map, but does not exist today. In its stead is a garage owned by a Pens fan.

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.

For the Benefit of Mr. Kite [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

The Tower, The Book [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Hopefully one of a series.