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Less than 24 hours after posting this question, I found and actually saw a similar installation. Low pressure one-pipe steam, the same radiator, only it’s three sections or six feet, instead of my single two-foot section. If it is pitched at all, it is not apparent to the eye (and that’s with the floor as a reference). It has a short 3/4 inch nipple coming into the inlet valve through the floor, the rest is one inch pipe back to the main, maybe ten feet away. My radiator will be less than five feet from the main. The air vent is a small cylindrical valve, maybe 1 inch tall and 1/2 inch diameter, turned on its side (!) to fit within the end enclosure of the radiator. The radiator was installed maybe five years ago by a licensed plumber as part of a kitchen renovation, replacing a old cast iron column-type radiator.
It works just fine, delivering heat with no banging and no water coming out of the air vent. So my planned installation should work too. I guess that plumber and the plumbing supply house that recommended that radiator (I went there to buy a Slant Fin but they convinced me to get the cast iron Burnham instead) knew what they were doing, despite Burnham’s claim that the Base-Ray baseboard radiator “is not designed for steam.”
