The world outside the front door
Shadyside.
A field guide to the neighborhood — the everyday spots, the worth-the-walk ones, and the people and places that make Shadyside feel like Shadyside.
A field guide to the neighborhood — the everyday spots, the worth-the-walk ones, and the people and places that make Shadyside feel like Shadyside.
Shadyside takes its name from a place that no longer exists. Before the Civil War, the land east of Pittsburgh was open countryside — gentle hills, hardwood stands, scattered farms, and a handful of country estates belonging to merchants and industrialists who had grown rich enough to escape the soot and noise of the downtown wharves. One of those properties, the farm of Thomas Aiken, was known as "Shady Side" for the dense forest cover that once sheltered its lawns. When the Pennsylvania Railroad ran a line east through the area, opening in 1852, Aiken and his son David lobbied for a stop on their land. The railroad granted it in 1860, and a small depot called Shady Side Station was built at the end of what is now Amberson Avenue — the same street the Garden House stands on. The neighborhood that grew up around the station eventually took its name from the station. Aiken's farm has long since been subdivided into the streets and lots that make up the heart of Shadyside, but the name has outlasted the place.
(There is a competing story: that the name was first suggested for the station itself by David Aiken's wife Caroline — either after a book she was reading, or for trees she had planted in the area as a girl. The historians have not settled it. Either way, the name belongs to the family.)
The story of Shadyside is, more than anything, the story of Pittsburgh's industrial Gilded Age told in domestic architecture. The Aikens began subdividing and selling lots from their farm in the 1860s, and once the trains ran, the wealth followed: as the city's industrial fortunes concentrated through the late nineteenth century, the men who controlled steel, glass, banking, and oil moved their families east into what was then still breathable air. The Mellons built here. So did the Heinzes. Below them, a wide layer of bankers, lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, and merchants put up the more modest but still imposing houses that line streets like Amberson, Ellsworth, Devonshire, Maryland, and Aurelia today. By 1900, Shadyside was effectively a streetcar suburb — joined to downtown by trolley lines that made the daily commute possible and the neighborhood viable as a year-round home rather than a summer retreat.
The Aiken family's stamp on the neighborhood went beyond the lots they sold. Thomas and David Aiken were among the founders of Shadyside Presbyterian Church in 1867, and in 1869 they were part of the small group that met in David's home to begin organizing Pennsylvania Female College — the institution that, after a century of growth, became Chatham University. Other religious congregations followed and built ambitious churches: Calvary Episcopal on Shady Avenue, Sacred Heart Roman Catholic also on Shady, and the East Liberty Presbyterian tower visible from much of the neighborhood. The bones of Shadyside — the streets, the lots, most of the houses, the churches, the institutions — were largely set by the First World War.
Shadyside passed through the twentieth century the way many of Pittsburgh's older neighborhoods did: with some loss and a great deal of survival. Several large estates were broken up and redeveloped between the wars and again in the postwar decades, replaced with apartment buildings and smaller houses. Walnut Street, originally the neighborhood's general-store corridor, evolved into a regional shopping district. Some of the grandest homes were divided into apartments or boarding houses, and others were lost entirely. But Shadyside avoided the wholesale demolition that flattened other parts of the East End, and by the 1970s a determined preservation movement, knit together by neighborhood associations and individual owners, had effectively stopped further teardowns. Most of the streetscape you walk today is what was built between 1880 and 1925.
Today Shadyside is one of Pittsburgh's most desirable neighborhoods — and, for a city its size, one of the most consistently walkable. Three commercial corridors run through it: Walnut Street (boutiques, restaurants, the corner cafés people meet at), Ellsworth Avenue (a quieter mix of bars, restaurants, and small shops), and South Highland Avenue (the bridge into East Liberty, lately the most active stretch of all). The residential streets between them remain what they were a hundred years ago: brick sidewalks under mature canopies of maple, oak, and ginkgo; rows of stone-and-stucco houses set back behind low walls and picket fences; small front gardens that turn over with the seasons.
The neighborhood is small enough to be known by foot. Mellon Park lies at its eastern edge — once Richard Beatty Mellon's private estate, now a public park with a formal walled garden, summer concerts, and wide lawns that fill with picnic blankets between June and September. The Carnegie museums, Phipps Conservatory, and Schenley Park are a short walk south through Oakland. The Frick Pittsburgh house museum sits to the east in Point Breeze. Frick Park, the city's largest, is twenty minutes' walk and offers hours of trails. Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and the medical centers of Oakland are close enough that Shadyside has long served as a residential ground for academics, doctors, and students alongside the longer-tenured families.
704 Amberson sits on what is, by most accounts, one of the prettiest residential blocks in the neighborhood — a wide, gently curved street lined with the kind of stone-and-stucco houses that Shadyside is known for, set back behind low walls and old hedges. There is a particular significance to this street: Shadyside Station, the small Pennsylvania Railroad depot that gave the neighborhood its name, stood at Amberson's southern end from 1860 until the line was eventually decommissioned. In a sense, this street is where the neighborhood began. The houses along Amberson today date mostly from the 1890s through the 1920s; many, including this one, are still in their original footprints, and the gardens have aged into the street as much as the houses have.
What follows on this page is the practical side of being in Shadyside — where to get groceries and coffee, where to walk on a Sunday, who to call when something on the street needs attention. The history is here so the practical details have somewhere to land.
A house lasts because the block does too. A few notes on the people and rhythms of the immediate neighborhood — to be filled in by whoever lives here.
Names and house numbers of the immediate neighbors, what they do, who has lived here longest, who knows the most about the block's history.
