Construction on Panther Hollow Road Appears to be Over

Looks all new and patched and shiny, too!

Panther Hollow Road is Under Construction!

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

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

Pittsburgh knows Kung Fu! Or so I though.

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

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

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

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.