Friendship. The little neighborhood–surely one of the smallest in the city by acreage–is full of stately turn-of-the-century homes and an enviable location adjacent to Bloomfield, Garfield, and East Liberty. It’s also home to nice, walkable sidewalks on quiet, tree-lined blocks that are–by Pittsburgh standards–relatively easy on the feet. Bargain grocery shoppers in the East End know Friendship as the neighborhood with two Aldi stores. But to The Orbit, it’s sidewalk stamp Nirvana.

You’ll find all the regular players here: DiBucci, Pucciarelli Brothers, Spano, Baleno–heck, one of the folks from A. Ciriello parks a branded red work truck right out front on Friendship Ave. There’s also a bunch of one-offs, old and new, including the inimitable, no-last-name-needed Jerry [more on these, later]. All this said, where Friendship really walks the walk is in the ultra-rare field of brass sidewalk plaques.

The computer Internet contains very little information regarding the history of The Wadsworth Stone & Paving Co. In fact, all this Googler could locate was a single historical photo taken on a winter day in 1911 showing the company’s big industrial building on Hamilton Ave. in Larimer.

Regardless, Wadsworth literally left their mark around town in the form of several different designs of brass sidewalk plaques. Friendship is fortunate enough to have no less than three different variants–the most glorious containing the company’s name emanating from a rising sun over rugged mountains, now appearing green from the oxidation of the copper (above). These two markers are of a generation before the term concrete appears to be in common use–the designs are just-the-facts basic, but contain the alluring details describing “silica-barytic stone” in one and “artificial stone” in the other.

Friendship, of course, does not hold exclusive rights to anything–even in the superlative quaintness of its name. That is, at least, not while Fairywood is still on the map. So we see brass plaques throughout town, just not with the same block-for-block density we get between Baum Blvd. and Penn Ave.

Millvale and Lawrenceville both turn in paired sets of great old-school sidewalk markers. E. Martina’s can be roughly dated with the 1950s-era named telephone exchange Everglade (EV) 1-8022 in the embedded phone number of the plaque’s triumphant shield shape.

Speaking of dating these plaques (and the sidewalk jobs around them), several of the designs here contain the apparent misprinted city name Pittsburg (sic.)–without the H. That’s no error, though. For a little over twenty years (officially, 1890-1911) the city’s name was changed to this shortened, streamlined spelling.

That would seem to be a pretty clear approximate date for these sidewalks but every source seems to suggest the alternate spelling was used both before 1890 (leading to the initial confusion that required official action) and for several decades after repeal (people can be obstinate). It’s hard to imagine any piece of pavement could last through more than a hundred Pittsburgh winter freeze-thaw cycles…and these may not actually have done so.

The mysterious G! This example is such an outlier–it’s steel, not brass and it doesn’t contain any identifiable name or contact info–one almost wonders if it’s actually a marker for a gas line or other underground infrastructure. With that thought in mind, it’s clearly a single embedded piece with no valve opening or other obvious utile function. Maybe someone just wanted to mark a gas line, or maybe “G” just liked to keep things simple.

On the new end of the spectrum come two from Nick Scotti–who we first saw in Larry Kramer’s original sidewalk stamp piece [“Stamp Collecting: More Pittsburgh Easter Eggs, Set in Concrete“, Pittsburgh Orbit, May 5, 2017]–and a much more modern-looking one from a corporate parking lot poured by Jendoco. While these aren’t quite as exciting as a weathered Wadsworth, it’s great to see current contractors keeping up the tradition.

A few other interesting tidbits. Mason R. Albright created a unique piece the likes of which we’ve not encountered elsewhere. Albright has apparently had his name, phone number, and an installation date etched into stone which was then set into the poured concrete of a sidewalk on Saline Street in The Run (above). It ain’t brass, but it’s still very much of the calling-card plaque variety, so we’re including it here.

Alternately, just one sleepy intersection–the corner of Lytton and Parkman Aves. in the Schenley Farms section of Oakland–has these embedded brass street names oriented for pedestrians. They’re neat, but seem like they would have been part of a larger strategy of infrastructure design that either was never adopted on the wider neighborhood, or (more likely) are the last remnants after other sections of sidewalk were replaced due to damage or the installation of accessible curb cuts, etc. Sadly, we may never know.

Many thanks to ace sidewalk-stepper and detail-procurer Paul Schifino with his contributions to this story.

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* This same terrific Wadsworth rising-sun-over-mountains plaque has also been spotted in East Liberty and Millvale.