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Boston native steps all over Pittsburgh, mapping stairs as he goes
Wednesday, October 27, 1999 By Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
About 15 people on Wickliff Street in Stanton Heights can honestly say they live between 56th Street and 56th Street. Both are marked with street signs. One is paved and accommodates cars. The other is a plunge of steps. They lead down to Butler Street in Lawrenceville.
In the naturally unparallel little universe that the late scribe Ernie Pyle called "undoubtedly the cockeyedest city in the United States," these two 56th Streets are, basically, parallel.
Bob Regan found the redundancy this summer while he was discovering just how cockeyed Pittsburgh is.
"How do delivery people do it?" Regan said, pulling his car into a clearing where Marietta Street ends, at the top of a hill in Morningside. A street named Premo meets it at the angle of a completely bent elbow: "You can see why this was a project I had to do on my bicycle."
A 60-year-old native of Boston, Regan is a morning bicyclist who became fascinated by Pittsburgh's city-owned steps when he moved here eight years ago. He lives in Squirrel Hill.
Just this summer, enticed by a dramatic stairway on the South Side Slopes, Regan began combining his daily morning bike rides with climbing up and down all the steps he encountered, counting each tread. He became enamored of these ubiquitous, sometimes tortured flights of fancy. He admired Pittsburgh's early carvers for challenging topography to make the city livable by creating these pedestrian thoroughfares to help people get from one hilly street level to another.
He called the city to find out how many steps it could account for. It turned out the city had data on the steps but no corresponding maps. He borrowed the data and, after his bike rides, would go home and plot the steps on his computer mapping program; he is a software mapping consultant for Geographical Information System.
Regan has verified and mapped some 700 stairways since early summer. Of those, 360 are actual streets. They are honored by actual street signs, and on street maps they appear as streets. People's mailboxes line some of them. He thinks he has found and climbed every stairway by now, including 149 on which the city had no data.
Regan plans to donate what will likely be the most complete and accurate mapping of city steps to the city's Department of Public Works when he is finished.
Debbie Beiber, who is in charge of mapping databases for public works, says she is eager to have Regan's thorough synthesis of mapping and data.
The city built the first steps -- none of which remains as original -- about 200 years ago. The oldest ones are wood. Government work projects during the Depression repaired and installed many, but the job of upkeep has been difficult. One reason is that the city's topography makes mapping and data hard to reconcile. Maps are made by tracing photos from aerial fly-overs, but some steps can't be seen from the air. When they are visible, it's not always clear which steps are the city's and which are private.
In a 1937 travel dispatch for Scripps Howard newspapers, Pyle, who later reported from the front lines of World War II, wrote about Pittsburgh, "Physically, it is absolutely irrational. It must have been laid out by a mountain goat. It's up and down, and around and around and in betwixt." He writes of the "countless tunnels," bridges, inclines and wacky railroad paths and builds to a crescendo with, "And the steps -- oh Lord, the steps!"
If stacked like one giant ladder -- 43,937 steps, each at 6 1/2 inches high -- Pittsburgh's city steps would reach 24,000 feet. That's higher than some peaks in Tibet. Of the hilly major cities in the United States, only Cincinnati is in Pittsburgh's league.
Cincinnati claims 400 stairways, 300 fewer than Pittsburgh, and a step history 100 years younger, but its work crews face similar struggles to get ahead of the pace of deterioration, said Mark Ginty, an engineer in Cincinnati's public-works department. One particularly troublesome set of steps can eat up half the $225,000 step-repair budget, he said.
San Francisco, the nation's most obvious city for steps, has been celebrated in a book "Stairway Walks of San Francisco." It has 168 city stairways.
That's a few more than Pittsburgh's top four city-step neighborhoods combined.
The South Side Slopes can claim the greatest concentration of steps, with 67 stairways. Beechview is next with 38. Mount Washington has 32 and Perry South has 26. Four sets have 300-plus treads each.
Some people's homes open onto steps, making you wonder how, say, a refrigerator might be delivered. But some, with broken treads and overgrown foliage, would be almost impassable even without a load.
The Department of Public Works dispatches crews regularly to maintain the steps, says acting director Guy Costa, but next year he hopes DPW can hire a contractor "to help us catch up" with upkeep.
Mayor Murphy's capital budget for 2000 proposes allocating $190,000 to Costa's department for step maintenance and $250,000 to the Department of Engineering and Construction for step repair. The proposal, now before City Council, does not represent an increase over last year, but Costa said the 2001 proposal will be to increase the allotment to steps.
Regan thinks Pittsburgh's steps are important enough, and unusual enough in a nation of mostly flat cities, to attract visitors. He and photographer Tim Fabian of the South Side plan a book on the steps, and Regan wants to drum up support for an annual event, a "Step Trek Pittsburgh," with T-shirts that read "I Trekked Pittsburgh" or "I Stepped All Over Pittsburgh."
Regan tells people of his hopes, and some think he is weird. He laughs and says, "That's OK. I don't have time for people who don't have a sense of fun.
"This has been a labor of love."
One morning, on the North Side, Regan cycled east along Spring Garden Avenue and turned left onto Homer Street. Based on his map, Diana Street would be a left turn coming right up. There it was. But Regan had to get off his bike to climb it. Diana is a zig and a zag straight up a hillside, with a tower leading from its base to the second landing. From there, it moves up through an overhang of foliage.
One of the most elusive sets of steps was literally under Regan's nose, in Squirrel Hill. It leads back from a sidewalk along South Dallas Avenue where Edgerton Avenue intersects. If you're facing Dallas at the light at Edgerton, you might think Edgerton has ended. But between two pretty houses, a long walkway, amid bushes, leads to a short flight of city steps.
"I tried several times to find these," says Regan. "I knew they had to be here.
"You would never dream that was public space if you didn't know."
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