An unmistakable Frank Vittor eagle; compare it to the eagle on the West End World War I memorial and the one on the portal to the Boulevard of the Allies. City records confirm that Frank Vittor was the sculptor.(1)
The memorial stands in Robert E. Williams Memorial Park, originally Herron Hill Park, which was laid out in 1889. It is a very pleasant green space in a pleasant residential section of the Upper Hill.
Because war memorials sometimes become illegible for various reasons, and because a historian friend has been trying to reconstruct the names on another World War I memorial and finding the task difficult, old Pa Pitt has decided to record all the names on this memorial. If you enlarge the pictures, you should be able to read every name clearly.
The emblem of the Corps of Engineers, which in an earlier version of the article Father Pitt had mistaken for the arms of Pittsburgh. Thanks to our commenter below for the correction.
A map showing the location of the memorial.
Footnotes
- See this draft report on green space in the Hill District by a landscape-design company. (↩)
2 responses to “Fifth Ward World War I Memorial, Upper Hill”
If Pa Pitt will accept a slight correction, the castle in question is the symbol of the Corps of Engineers. It is very similar to the seal of Pittsburgh, but there are differences and the manner in which it is set with the badges of the Infantry, Artillery, Signal Corps, and Navy would seem to confirm the identity.
In the interests of a weirder future, perhaps an alt text proclaiming it to be the Olde Stonewall Golf Club might be in order.
Of course, while checking myself on the above statements, I ran into this great tidbit on the city’s website:
“According to Doug MacGregor, museum educator at the Fort Pitt Museum, “The origin of the three gold coins goes back to Byzantine times. They are actually called bezants and represented real money and it became a symbol of honesty in coats of arms. While making the seal of Pittsburgh in 1816, the draftsman was confused as to what they were called and thought they were called ‘pheasants’ instead of bezants. The draftsman thought pheasants were not a majestic enough bird for our seal so he made them eagles on the Pittsburgh seal.”
Why bother trying to intentionally humorously obfuscate information? We do it well enough accidentally.
Because, apparently I can’t escape this subject this morning: Some sources claim that the bezants/pheasants/eagles in yellow circles mistake happened in 1845, when the seal had to be recreated from memory, all copies of it having been lost in the Great Fire.
Perhaps Pa Pitt can search his memoirs for the real answer here.