Father Pitt

Calvary Methodist Church in Allegheny West is floodlit at night, and old Pa Pitt stopped the other night to get a few pictures. The church was designed by the Kansas City firm of Vrydagh & Shepard, with their representative Thomas B. Wolfe supervising in Pittsburgh. Vrydagh soon followed Wolfe to Pittsburgh and changed his spelling to Vrydaugh, and Vrydaugh & Wolfe became a partnership designing a number of fine churches and millionaires’ mansions.¹

These pictures were all taken hand-held with very slow shutter speeds. Photographers will tell you that you cannot take a sharp hand-held picture at 1/10 of a second. What they mean is that you cannot reliably take a sharp picture. With digital photography, where individual pictures cost nothing, what you can do is take a dozen or two pictures and hope that one of them will be sharp.

1. This is a revision of the original article. The firm is spelled “Vrydaugh and Shepherd” on the PHLF plaque and in all Pittsburgh references; but “Shepherd” was actually Charles E. Shepard, and Vrydaugh was spelling his name Vrydagh in Kansas City, so it was a long time before old Pa Pitt sorted out the truth. Here is what he wrote originally: “The design of this church is credited to Vrydaugh & Shepherd with T. B. Wolfe. Vrydaugh & Wolfe would soon become a partnership designing a number of fine churches and millionaires’ mansions. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened to Shepherd.” ↩︎