St. Ann’s was built in our most Hungarian neighborhood for Hungarian Catholics. The cornerstone was laid in 1919; the congregation worshiped in the basement of the unfinished building for a few years, and finished the church in 1925. The church closed in 1998, and the building was sold; its current owners have kept it from falling down.1 That is as much as old Pa Pitt knows about the church, other than what you see in these pictures.
From the front, the church seems extremely tall, with its sanctuary upstairs from the main entrance. However, Hazelwood is a neighborhood mostly built on a slope, and the altar end of the sanctuary is at ground level. The cross in a circle on the façade was originally a rose window.
Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about this building other than what you see in the pictures. It had an attractive front, and it remains interesting to look at even though the windows have been filled in and some of the brickwork has been very sloppily repointed.
The right-hand side was built with rusticated concrete blocks, which were all the rage in the 1920s and 1930s.
The striking feature of this modernist synagogue is the huge relief over the entrance that symbolically depicts the Twelve Tribes of Israel surrounding the Tablets of the Law. The architects were Ben Friedman and Nathan Cantor, although Father Pitt has not yet sorted out whether they worked together or at different times.
Ground was broken for the first part of the building on April 20, 1947; first services were conducted September 3, 1948. Ground for the Rabbi Sivitz Memorial Talmud Torah and Main Building was broken August 17, 1952; it was dedicated on August 27, 1955.
This preliminary sketch for the synagogue was published on the cover of the Jewish Criterion, August 23, 1946. The sketch is quite different from the building as it stands, but obviously an early stage in the evolution of the same idea. Through the halftoning, we can just make out the name “Friedman” in the signature.
The symbols are taken from the prophecy of Jacob in Genesis 49:
Reuben, unstable as water;
Simeon and Levi: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations (but Simeon’s sword is mitigated by a wreath of olive, and Levi later became the priestly class, and thus is represented by a swinging censer);
Judah is a lion’s whelp;
Zebulun shall be for an haven of ships;
Issachar is a strong ass, crouching down between two burdens;
Dan shall be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward;
Gad, a troupe shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last;
Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties;
Naphthali is a hind let loose;
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall;
A rainy November afternoon is the perfect time to spend an hour or two in the art museum. Here are a few of the things you might see if you visited the Carnegie right now.
Aurora Leigh, by John White Alexander, 1904: an imaginative portrait of the heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel. Alexander’s last and greatest work was the decoration of the Grand Staircase in the Carnegie, so you’ll have a chance to see those murals, too.
Sunrise Synchromy in Violet, by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1918.
Rue de L’Abreuvoir, by Maurice Utrillo, 1911.
Harbor Mole, by Lionel Feininger, 1923.
Rue de Beaujour, Pontoise, by Camille Pissarro, 1872.
The shopping arcade at Fifth Avenue Place, like almost all indoor shopping arcades and a good many enclosed shopping malls, withered and emptied, so advertising it on the Liberty Avenue entrance no longer made sense. The new entrance is much more restrained, modernist rather than postmodernist. This, in case you don’t remember, is what it used to look like:
Father Pitt will not fault the tasteful modernism of the new design in isolation—in fact he thinks it makes a good picture—but it does not fit the spirit of Reagan-era excess in the building itself. It would have been better to leave the old entrance, with its gold-foil arch and its giant clock, and just remove the signs.
It is a rule, however, that the style of the previous generation is always the most embarrassing, and the style of the generation before it is always to be preferred. It seems to old Pa Pitt that today’s architects and builders are embarrassed by the exuberant postmodernism of the 1980s, and are taking every opportunity to remold it into fussily correct International Style modernism, exactly the same way their ancestors of a century ago were embarrassed by the exuberant Victorianism of the 1880s and were taking every opportunity to remold it into fussily correct classicism.
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.
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.
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.
