Beechview urban hike: funky steps, Canton Avenue climb, delicious pizza at Slice on Broadway

Dec 28, 2013 · 3 minute read · Comments
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Abby and I wanted to go out on a hike together, but the trails tend not to be so much to hike on these winter days, so we decided to do an exploratory urban hike.

I randomly chose for us to explore Beechview, which is actually still part of the city of Pittsburgh even though it is south, across the Monongahela River. We’d never been to this neighborhood before.

Actually, the choice wasn’t quite random.

Canton Avenue

I originally thought of checking this place out because of recently hearing about Canton Avenue, which is used in the annual Dirty Dozen bike competition (see Danny Chew’s site). Canton Avenue is the “steepest officially recorded public street in the United States”. I know some people who did the Dirty Dozen this year (2013), so Canton Avenue was fresh in my mind.

I have no intention of ever biking up Canton Avenue, but its existence got me curious and I thought, why not check out a new neighborhood and walk up this street as part of a hike.

Pizza

I was also craving some pizza. So I checked to see if there was any interesting pizza place in Beechview. It turned out that there was a fairly new place called Slice on Broadway in Beechview! So it was settled. We’d walk around the neighborhood, check out Canton Avenue, and eat at Slice on Broadway.

Summary

We did that and had a good time. And the pizza was actually quite good: a relatively thin crust, the way I like it. We were so hungry that we each ate an antipasto salad (pretty good) before the large specialty pizza was ready (well, yes, we did take home leftovers).

One thing we didn’t do was navigate all the steps we saw, because of the residual ice that obviously made things dangerous. Maybe we’ll come back later in the spring and take a tour of the steps. We find the steps of Pittsburgh fascinating, but still have not explored all the neighborhoods that have such steps.

Some photos

It’s pretty hilly in Beechview:

We braved this staircase that involved a little bit of snow:

There was this weird short trail:

Emerging from the trail:

Well, this is the view going up Canton Avenue. It’s steep but short:

Some steps along a street:

The trolley in action:

The station where the trolley had come from:

More steps, but we were getting hungry, and so we did not follow them:

Pizza! I almost forgot to take a photo as we already started devouring the pizza: