An uncluttered view of East Carson Street

Architect Jerry Morosco, a South Side resident, invited me recently to walk part of East Carson Street with him. He wanted to point out something.

Its inventory of Victorians is the richest, but the variety includes neoclassical, Second Empire and art deco.

We met at the South Side Market House on 12th Street and walked up to East Carson.

Jerry looked up. I looked up. I saw the neoclassical Iron and Glass Dollar Savings Bank, built in 1926. It is powerful, a little ponderous, typical of neoclassical banks. But what we were looking at wasn’t there.

“No power lines,” Jerry said. I stared, felt my jaw drop. Wow! That’s what’s different! Such

clarity, even a sense of relief, like a house cleared of clutter.

As we walked, we drank in the unencumbered view of buildings from 1885, 1887, 1890 — contemporaries of the AC/ DC war that Westinghouse Electric, here in Pittsburgh, won against Edison. By the mid- 1880s, alternating current was running through wires that juiced street lamps all over America.

Those wires have hung above

old cities ever since. We, and most of these buildings, have never had unencumbered views of each other until now.

“How fresh they look,” Jerry said.

The difference is profound, and yet I wondered whether I would have noticed on my own. We get so used to seeing what we’ve always seen that it becomes etched over time as an expectation of what we will see. The etched version remains until something, or someone, makes us hit the reset button.

“We’re so used to tuning out all sorts of audible and visual noise,” Jerry said. “We look at these lines as ‘ it is what it is’ without recognizing how much they detract.”

Crews were working as we walked the block between 14th and 15th streets. The old poles are being removed, and glossy black lampposts with acornshaped globes are taking their place. They will be juiced by new lines buried in trenches underground.

The city’s $ 3 million project, from 10th to 25th streets, is expected to be completed ahead of a street resurfacing project by the state Department of Transportation. That should begin in November and stretch from Smithfield to 33rd streets.

PennDOT’s $ 17 million project is intended to update all traffic lighting and resurface the roadway, add bumpouts for pedestrian safety and improve curb ramps.

Street trees will be replaced, possibly after the state finishes its work, city Councilman Bruce Kraus said.

Only the wires that supply electricity to street lamps — not wires to traffic lights or wires into buildings — are being buried.

All cities of a certain age are plagued by the clutter of utility wires above our heads. Some run parallel, like a musical staff, but in places, there are so many that you wonder whether they represent every time a family that lived in that house changed cable companies.

At some intersections, lines hang in tangles. Across some side streets, they look like hanks of wet hair.

When cities were gritty, dirty, tough and hard, these wires may not have rated as ugly. But they are misfits in today’s urban landscape of street trees, flower baskets, benches and soft lighting.

Jerry and I continued to admire buildings we were seeing in a new light.

One is 1309 East Carson. It has stone window heads suggestive of art deco, a deeply inset entrance alcove with a terrazzo tile floor, a leaded glass transom, rusticated stone above the pilasters that frame a doorway to the right of the storefront, and vertical stone that frames the corners the entire height of the building, a design called quoining.

After admiring the vernacular charm of 1105, with its whimsical ball finial, and the elegance of 1103, a Romanesque with fleur- de- lis finials, I stole a long look at the South Side Welcome Center — being a sucker for Second Empire — and then we strolled back to where I had parked.

At Jack’s Bar, a place I have passed maybe 100 times, I stopped. Stone griffins — half eagle, half lion — sat atop each of the two first- floor pilasters. I had never noticed them before, but on this sightseeing excursion, they leaped out at me.