Your walk takes you through one of Pittsburgh's most intact Victorian residential neighborhoods, a grid of streets whose names commemorate the United States' war with Mexico in 1846: Buena Vista, Monterey, Palo Alto, Resaca, Sampsonia. The streets were laid out in 1847, when the developer who subdivided this land named the streets after battles he read about in the daily newspapers. Pittsburgh was then the fastest-growing industrial city in the country, and housing was being built on the North Side as fast as lumber could be cut.
The townhouses here, mostly built between 1850 and 1880, represent the full range of Victorian architectural fashion: Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne. Working-class row houses sit next to middle-class townhouses that sit next to the occasional mansion of a factory owner. This neighborhood went through decades of decline after the steel collapse but has experienced significant restoration since the 1970s.
It is a rare case of a Pittsburgh neighborhood where the Victorian housing stock survived intact. Look at the cornices, the bay windows, the iron fences: this is what Pittsburgh looked like when it was the steel capital of the world.