A Highly Personalized Bike Tour of Pittsburgh’s East End

While my preferred form of weekend recreation is hiking and backpacking, bicycling is a close second.  Riding the streets of Pittsburgh has its challenges – potholes, clueless drivers and a total lack of anything approaching level ground – but it’s my favorite way to get around town.  

In some cases, a bike is the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B in the city, especially when you factor-in finding a parking spot . . . not to mention feeding Pittsburgh’s voracious parking meters.  What’s more, there’s no better way to get in touch with the city, its neighborhoods, its people and its history than from the seat of a bike.

Last Sunday was a perfect case in point, as a two-three hour ride around the East End touched a veritable cornucopia of the city’s cultural/historical highpoints in the Highland Park, East Liberty, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Oakland, Bloomfield and Garfield neighborhoods. 

All told it amounted to about a ten mile ride, with really only one grunt of a climb up Beachwood Blvd from Shadyside to Squirrel Hill and, on the return leg, up Shady Avenue to Beacon Street, high point of Squirrel Hill.

One of the gracious houses along that slog up Beachwood Blvd was once the home of Fred “Mister” Rogers.  Back in the day, Mister Rogers used to walk to work at the WQED studios in Oakland; not every day, but on a sun-splashed afternoon like this past Sunday, it’s easy to imagine Fred hoofing it – perhaps in his Keds – over to Shady or Wilkins Avenues, down to Fifth Avenue and on to WQED.

One of the neat things about living in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s is that we really were part of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  Just to name a couple of "for instances" -- the cousin of one of my best friends played the role of Handyman Aber, and the father of my daughter’s grade school friend appeared in another show.

Further along Beachwood sit the neo-gothic structures of St. Philomena Academy, used as a setting in 1996’s forgettable Diabolique (starring Sharon Stone, who hails from not too distant Crawfordsville, PA).  And right behind St Philomena’s stands Taylor Alderdice High School where Curtis Martin played football before matriculating at the University of Pittsburgh and, later, going on to a Hall of Fame career with the New England Patriots and the New York Jets.

On semi-level ground now, you wind past the new development of Somerset, rising on slag heaps that are the by-products of decades of steel making.  Soon you’re confronted with a panoramic vista of the Monongahela River valley stretching from Turtle Creek, Braddock and Rankin to Homestead – site of a bloody confrontation in 1892 between the nascent steel workers union and the stooges of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the Pinkerton Detective Agency and, finally the Pennsylvania militia. 

  

US Steel’s Homestead works are long gone, replaced by the sprawling Waterfront shopping center.  The only physical reminders of the site’s history is a line of smoke stacks bordering one of the parking lots and, tucked away at the far end, the steel mill’s pump house.  The pump house served as a redoubt for the strikers and today contains a memorial plaque honoring John Faris, killed by a Pinkerton sharpshooter.

The bike path along Beachwood Blvd ends at Brown’s Hill Road, so it’s time for a U-Turn.  Halfway between St Philomena’s and Mister Rogers’ house, a left and a steep climb up Shady Avenue brings you to another modest piece of Pittsburgh’s cinematic history: a row of houses that posed as Motown in NBC’s made-for-TV movie The Temptations. 

Free-wheeling through nearby Schenley Park, you enjoy the downhill run bought and paid for earlier by the slog from Shadyside up to Squirrel Hill.  Work through the Carnegie-Mellon University campus and you emerge on Fifth Avenue, near the WQED studios that were once the destination of Fred Rogers’ walks.  Although the WQED building is a remarkably non-descript exercise in poured concrete, the T-Rex standing out front in the Mr Rogers sweater is dead give-away to what's inside . . . 

Next door to the home of Fred’s mythical neighborhood stands Central Catholic High School, where another local kid played high school football before going on to Pitt and a pretty fair NFL career of his own . . . fellow named Dan Marino.

Pedal a few blocks further along Fifth Avenue and you’ll come to Mellon Institute, whose neo-classical edifice will soon appear in theatres as the stage for the climactic fight scene of the upcoming Batman epic The Dark Knight Rises.  A sharp right on Bellfield Ave eventually takes you past magnificent (but sadly, closed) Schenley High School, alma mater of Matthew and Laura Phillips – not to mention George Benson and Andrew Warhola (aka Andy Warhol).

From here it’s on to Bloomfield – where another local chap named John Unitas played semi-pro ball for the Bloomfield Rams for $6 a game after he was cut by the Steelers -- and Garfield.  Garfield is a neighborhood very much in the midst of a fascinating “transition,” with derelict buildings standing cheek-to-jowel with funky coffee shops, bookstores, art studios, nail salons and store front lawyers.

On one side of the Penn Avenue that serves as Garfield’s main street, stands St. Laurence O’Toole Catholic church where Matthew Phillips was baptized.  On the other side of the street is the Pittsburgh Family center, supported in part by another true Pittsburgher (by choice rather than birth) Mario Lemieux.

Back across Penn Ave from the family center is the St. Laurence O’Toole parish’s social/recreational building.  A close inspection reveals the building is named Laurentian Hall.  Is it mere coincidence that Laurentian Hall stands across the street from a family center supported by a guy who learned to play his incomparable brand of ice hockey in Montreal, not far removed from Quebec’s ancient Laurentian Mountains?  

Getting close to home now, a left on Negley and a right onto East Liberty Boulevard brings you past Peabody High School which, like Schenley High School, is currently mothballed.  In Schenley’s case, the purported reason for its closure was the prohibitive cost of removing copious quanties of asbestos insulation.  Cynics suggest the city of Pittsburgh has an ulterior motive for Schenley’s closing, namely selling the massive structure to the nearby University of Pittsburgh.  As for Peabody, in a scene worthy of Edgar Allen Poe, its graceful neo-classic structure was entombed in bricks in response to the original “energy crisis” and only a few vestiges of its true beauty remain . . . including a remnant of its own neo-classical facade and a monument to the "boys" who served in World War I.

   

It's at least comforting to know Peabody is scheduled to reopen as the “Obama Academy” for gifted students – some of whom may be pleased to learn they are attending the alma mater of another pretty remarkable Pittsburgh artist: Gene Kelly.   

Finally, my free-wheeling bicycle tour of the East End leads down Bryant Street past a blue and gold landmark sign all but hidden by the leafy branches of a maturing sapling.  A close inspection reveals the sign honors jazz great and Duke Ellington colleague Bill Eckstine, who grew up in the house that stands next to the Walnut Market.  

 

Like a lot of interesting facets of Pittsburgh (and other locales), it’s the sort of thing you’d miss breezing past in a car at 25 or 30 mph . . . and just the sort of thing that makes you glad you spied it from the seat of a bicycle.