Narrow frame and brick houses climb a hillside above the river, linked block to block by public stairways.
What South Side Slopes looks like
Streets climb the hillside above the Monongahela in long, steep runs, several too steep for a car and classed by the city as public stairways instead. About seventy sets of concrete and wood steps connect the blocks, with painted metal handrails along the steeper runs. keeps a stairway sidewalk down the center of its block.
The houses are narrow, one room wide and two rooms deep, built up to four storeys with balloon framing. Fronts carry carved doorways, cornices, corbelling and cast iron trim. Roofs vary from flat fronts to mansard towers with dormers on the larger buildings. Facades run from painted wood siding to brick, sometimes a different colour on each house along one block.
18th Street, Arlington Avenue and Josephine Street carry the commercial fronts, including converted corner buildings with ground floor storefronts and apartments above. From the hilltop streets near Billy Buck Hill, downtown Pittsburgh is visible across the river to the northwest. The Cathedral of Learning rises over Oakland to the northeast.
holds hiking trails, a small orchard and a community garden on a former ballfield partway up the slope. Houses here mostly date from the late 1800s and early 1900s, with small yards set against retaining walls holding the grade.
Shot in South Side Slopes
Jack Reacher and Sudden Death both used , one of the steeper runs on the hillside. Neither film dresses the street as anywhere else, using it and the city visible below it as itself.
Jack Reacher, 2012
The production added a false frontage to the real house at 1016 Fritz Street for a scene in which Reacher tracks down Jeb, the ringleader of the bar brawlers, to a home with terrific views over the city. The dressed front is smarter looking than the real house underneath. Street View
Sudden Death, 1995
A boy shoots a hockey puck down the steep street for a few seconds, the South Side's churches, redbrick buildings and the downtown skyline visible below the hill. The street is used as it stands, with nothing added for the shot. Street View
What South Side Slopes can double for
Mount Adams in Cincinnati, Ohio
Mount Adams climbs a hillside above the Ohio River on streets steep enough that several are stepped, with frame and brick houses built close together between the 1900s and the 1940s. The scale and the grade are close to the slopes here, down to the public stairs connecting one street to the next. Mount Adams is built more in brick and stone than wood. Its streets open onto wider views of the river and the ballpark, so a tight frame on a frame house front holds the match best. Try searching steep stepped streets now.
Telegraph Hill is laced with pedestrian only stairway streets between small frame cottages, some of the stairs built in wood and others in concrete, much like the runs that replace a street here on the steeper blocks. The cottages keep a similar scale, one and two storeys, close to the path rather than set back from it. San Francisco's cottages are shingled rather than wood sided, with the bay visible behind them in any wide shot toward the water. Try searching stairway streets now.
Lower Town in Quebec City, Quebec
The stairway streets connecting Lower Town to the cliff above climb at a similar grade to the steeper runs here, with narrow lanes and close built frontages either side. The comparison is architectural only, since nothing here has been documented standing in for Quebec on screen. Quebec's buildings are stone and stucco rather than wood frame, and French signage and a different roofline give it away in anything wider than a stair itself. Try searching narrow stone lanes now.
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