This blogger catches poison ivy if he just looks at it funny. So it was with some trepidation that I waded into the calf-high weeds in short pants to snap this pair of ghost houses in the 1400 block of Chateau Street. O but the risk was worth it! What prime examples of the form! The first (larger) house was clearly a short, two-story dwelling that lacked the big Italianate profile of the extant. It looks like a squat single-story addition (or possibly large porch) was added off the back. The extra roof line may be an added dormer, or it could have just been a line left from a since-removed gutter.
The second (smaller) ghost house is really remarkable. Two stories, and a centered chimney with no expansion. This entire house may have only been the two rooms (one up/one down), maybe five or six-hundred square feet; probably very old.
The finder’s fee on this one goes to Orbit superfan Lee Floyd who spotted the first house driving by on Chateau Street and was able to locate an approximate address on the computer internet. He astutely spun Google Maps around to catch the first house’s ghost sister just down the block. Together they make a great one-two ghost house party!
Google will eventually put all citizen-journalists out of business, but for now, it still took a nice rain-threatening bicycle ride to the neighborhood to get the quality photographs Orbit readers have come to expect. This particular section of Chateau/Manchester (still not sure what’s what down there) has other some really nice things that also got stashed in the digital photo bag. Hopefully they’ll surface in some future post(s).
This intriguing painted marker lives on the corner of a big brick warehouse building at Island and Preble Aves. in Manchester. I came across it bicycle-riding through the neighborhood last summer. It read like some weird code: H.W. 46 ft. It wasn’t until thinking about it days later that I put the pieces together: a date (March 18, 1936) and a measurement in feet. This had to be a high water marker for the Great St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936.
Floods happen in Pittsburgh somewhat regularly–especially right at the end of winter when all the collected ice upriver starts melting en masse–but the flood of 1936 was The Big One, the most devastating in the city’s history and the one that provoked massive flood control efforts in and around the city.
I had a heard about the flood a few times, first and most memorably from a much older co-worker at a place I was temping in the late 1990s who had personally experienced it as a child. He had this vivid memory of looking down on the city from Mt. Washington and seeing giant rolls of newsprint from the Pittsburgh Post printing facility downtown inflated by the water and floating down the river like giant marshmallows.
I’ve come across very few other physical artifacts of the flood (although one would think there are many others), so this was a really neat discovery. It wasn’t long, though, until I came across this second marker for the flood on a different ride, but also in the same general area of Manchester (exact address unknown).
Source: https://pittsburghorbit.com/tag/chateau/