Father Pitt

Author: Father Pitt

  • Allegheny County Courthouse

    Allegheny County Courthouse
    Samsung Digimax V4.

    From the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue (and try to explain that to an out-of-towner).

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  • Fintex

    Fintex sign

    Perhaps you have wondered, as you walked down Wood Street, what “Fint-x” was, whose prominent sign mostly reappeared a few years ago after having been covered for a long while.

    Fintex was a men’s clothing shop founded by Morry Goldman, noted Pittsburgh haberdasher. In its heyday, Fintex had multiple locations and advertised high style at low prices.

    Men, Too, Talk About Clothes
    Ad in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, March 8, 1934.

    In the 1950s, Fintex expanded into the suburbs: here we see the announcement of a new store at the Great Southern shopping center in Bridgeville.

    Grand opening of Fintex in the Great Southern Shoppers Mart
    Full-page ad in the Press, December 9, 1955

    Morry Goldman was the sponsor of a pro basketball team called the Pittsburgh Morrys, and a glance at their Wikipedia article will take you back to a lost age of small-time professional sports of which most modern sports fans have no notion.

  • One Mellon Center

    One Mellon Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Or BNY Mellon Center, or whatever it is called now that BNY Mellon is just BNY, seen from across the Mon.

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  • A Broad View of Steel Plaza

    Steel Plaza station

    An “ultra-wide” view of a Red Line car coming into Steel Plaza station, thanks to the five-megapixel “ultra-wide” auxiliary camera on Father Pitt’s phone.

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  • McGinley Hall, Duquesne University

    McGinley Hall
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    A massive new apartment tower for Duquesne University students, and a big improvement in the Uptown cityscape (it replaced a parking lot). The architects were Indovina Associates, who designed the building in a subdued version of the currently popular patchwork-quilt style, with materials that harmonize well with the other buildings along the Uptown corridor.

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  • Fancy Front in Allentown

    740 East Warrington Avenue
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    If you’re stuck in a dumpy old wooden building and your business is prospering, but not prospering that much, you can make a good impression by putting a new front on the building and leaving the rest. That’s what happened here. This is actually a wood-frame building—except on the street face, where the owner added a spiffy new brick and stone front. Old maps reveal the secret: a thin line of brick appears on the front of the wooden building between 1910 and 1923. Mission accomplished: the building looked new and expensive, but the owner wasn’t deep in debt.

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  • Chatham Two

    Two Chatham Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman, a firm that began in Butler and grew to be an international architectural titan, would become famous in the middle 1980s for postmodernist buildings like Liberty Center. This building, however, is prepostmodernist. It opened in 1981, and it is a straightforward modernist box with a Miesian look. Although it doesn’t arrest our attention the way some of the firm’s later projects do, it was a harbinger of Renaissance II, the building boom of the 1980s that remodeled Pittsburgh with a postmodernist skyline.

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  • Young Women Picking Fruit, by Mary Cassatt

    Mary Cassatt—Young Women Picking Fruit—1891

    “No woman has a right to draw like that,” said her friend Edgar Degas when he saw this painting—a compliment Mary Cassatt remembered for years. Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny (now the North Side of Pittsburgh) and grew up there. She studied art in Philadelphia for a while, but spent most of her life in France after that—although it is to the honor of Pittsburgh’s cultured citizens that, when she had to come back to America for a while, one of the first people to recognize Cassatt’s talent and give her a professional commission was Michael Domenec, the Roman Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh.

    This painting is one of the treasures of the Carnegie Museum of Art, whose collection of Impressionists is worth traveling a long way to see.

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  • Double Duplex in Crafton

    91–97 Bradford Avenue

    Craftsman meets Colonial in an attractive double duplex whose details are exceptionally well preserved—notably the showy carved brackets and the windows.

    91–97 Bradford Avenue
    91–97 Bradford Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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  • St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Hazelwood

    St. Paul’s Lutheran Church (Holy Cross), Hazelwood
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

    A small church that still belongs to Lutherans, now as Holy Cross Evangelical Lutheran Chapel (a Missouri Synod congregation). It is an exception to the general rule that Lutherans did not build corner-tower auditorium churches; the shape of the tiny lot dictated the shape of the church. The slope dictated that the sanctuary would be on the second floor if you enter from the front, but the ground floor if you enter from the back.