from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
import json
from pandas.io.json import json_normalize
path1 = '42.974049,-81.205203|42.974298,-81.195755'
request = Request(
    'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?locations=' + path1 +
    '&sensor=false')
response = urlopen(request)
elevations = response.read()
data = json.loads(elevations)
json_normalize(data['results'])
JSON to pandas DataFrame