Father Pitt

Why should the beautiful die?

Chatham Village

Another dip into the archives: some pictures of Chatham Village from 2005. Since the place hardly changes at all, they are current for practical purposes.

Chatham Village was a New-Deal-era utopian community, designed to be attractive cheap housing for the working classes. It was so attractive, in fact, that it is now more valuable than the neighborhood that surrounds it on Mount Washington.

The community owns the Bigham House, a fine 1844 farmhouse now used for community events and residents’ parties.

Old Pa Pitt was shocked to discover that Wikimedia Commons had very few pictures of Chatham Village. His own were taken at glorious 1-megapixel resolution, and they were huge compared to the other ones in the Commons collection. So he has donated all these pictures to Wikimedia Commons under the CC0 do-what-you-like license.

Camera: Fujifilm FinePix 2650.

See a random picture
and become a better person

You could buy this book
if you wanted a book.

Father Pitt

One response to “Chatham Village”

  1. Dover Gables, Shadyside – Father Pitt

    […] Shadyside is full of little townhouse communities that close themselves off from the rest of the world, either by facing an impossibly narrow dead-end private street, or, as here, by having no street at all and devoting the space between the rows to garden. There are a few other such plans here and there in the city, but only in Shadyside did they become a typical form of development. This one is meant to look as much like an English country village as a townhouse plan can look when you cram it into a narrow space one city block long. Old Pa Pitt was not able to determine the architects, and neither were other researchers he stumbled across. But Father Pitt is not the only one to point out how much this plan resembles a miniature Chatham Villlage. […]

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