Father Pitt

This small but grand building sits by the reservoirs behind the Waterworks shopping center. It was originally the administration building for the city waterworks; the architects were Rutan & Russell.¹ The windows that would have flooded the building with light have been blocked in, possibly for security reasons, but more likely because no one could see the point of maintaining glass windows when plywood covers the holes just as well.

On city planning maps, the waterworks, the Waterworks shopping center, and St. Margaret’s Hospital are in the Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhood, which is otherwise on the other side of the Allegheny—one of those neighborhood-boundary absurdities that no real Pittsburgher would recognize. Pittsburghers would say they are at Aspinwall, although they belong to the city and not the borough of Aspinwall.

Behind the encroaching jungle of vines and utility cables we can just make out a pair of classical dolphins—always the emblem of a water-related building—and a cartouche with the city arms.

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1. We had originally attributed the building to Thomas Scott “with some confidence,” which shows you how much old Pa Pitt’s confidence is worth. A photo of the building, with attribution to Rutan & Russell, appears in “Harmony in Filtration Plant Designing,” Gazette Times, December 11, 1910, third section, page 7. ↩︎