Father Pitt

Author: Father Pitt

  • May Building

    May Building

    Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.

    The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.

    Wreath on the cornice

    The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.

    Cartouche on the May Building
    May Building and addition

    The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.

  • Favorite Pictures of 2024

    Lobby of One PPG Place

    The lobby of One PPG Place. Father Pitt has decided to round up a random number (twenty-nine, as it turns out) of pictures from 2024 that he thought had exceeded his usual standard, and here they are to goad him into doing better next year.

    Lantern

    Lantern in Allegheny West.

    St. Bernard’s Church, Mount Lebanon

    St. Bernard’s Church, Mount Lebanon.

    House in Virginia Manor, Mount Lebanon

    House in Virginia Manor, Mount Lebanon.

    Liberty Avenue

    Liberty Avenue from Seventh Avenue.

    Roberto Clemente Bridge

    The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente bridge.

    Fern fiddlehead

    Fern fiddlehead.

    Fourth Avenue

    Fourth Avenue bank towers.

    Dandelion seeds

    Dandelion seeds.

    House in Seminole Hills

    House in Seminole Hills, Mount Lebanon.

    Donahoe’s Building

    Evening sun on the Donahoe’s building.

    Downtown

    A panorama of the skyline from Mount Washington.

    Entrance to the Union Trust Building

    Entrance to the Union Trust Building.

    Logan-Gregg Hardware Company

    The Logan-Gregg Hardware Company building, designed by Charles Bickel. This composite of six photographs produced a very good architectural elevation of the façade.

    Alcoa Corporate Center

    Alcoa Corporate Center.

    Liberty Center

    Liberty Center.

    Tree and moon

    Tree and moon.

    Grave of Andy Warhol

    A gravedigger at work behind the grave of Andy Warhol.

    Hilltop neighborhood with misty skyline

    Hilltop neighborhood with misty skyline.

    Linum usitatissimum

    Flax (Linum usitatissimum).

    Union Church

    Union Church in Robinson Township.

    Abstraction in the Gateway subway station

    Abstract forms in the Gateway subway station.

    Fall colors at Gateway Center

    Fall colors at Gateway Center.

    Tombstones in Clinton Cemetery

    This picture of tombstones in Clinton Cemetery was taken with an Argus A, which is going on 90 years old, on Kentmere Pan 100 film, and developed in a monobath. It was meant to be a picture for Halloween, and it succeeded in creating exactly the right mood.

    Armstrong monument

    Armstrong monument in the South Side Cemetery.

    Stairway in Acorn Hill

    A Novembery picture of a stairway on Acorn Hill.

    Mount Washington

    The back slopes of Mount Washington, seen with a long lens from Beltzhoover.

    Haller Baking Company

    The roofline of the Haller Baking Company building in Emsworth.

    Baywood Street

    A picture of some houses on Baywood Street in East Liberty. It looks like nothing special, but that is the point of it. It illustrates the streetscape very well, and in composition and color it is one of Father Pitt’s favorite pictures to look at.

  • The Fidelity Building, as Designed and as Built

    Fidelity Building as designed
    Fidelity Building as built

    In the engraving, the Fidelity Building on Fourth Avenue as it was designed. In the photograph, the building as it exists today (or actually as it existed in 2015, but not much has changed—even the posters for ABC Imaging were the same the last time old Pa Pitt looked). Father Pitt has tried to arrange the comparison to make the one substantial difference obvious: at some point between design and construction, one more floor was added.

    The architect, James T. Steen, was an early adopter of the Richardsonian Romanesque style: Richardson’s courthouse, which set off the mania for Romanesque in Pittsburgh, was still under construction when this building was put up. This was before the age of skyscrapers, when the base-shaft-cap formula gave architects a simple way of extending height indefinitely by multiplying identical floors in the middle. Here, Steen seems to have decided that just duplicating one of the floors would make the top of the building undersized and underwhelming. Instead, he added a new sixth floor between the fifth floor and what had been the sixth but now became the seventh floor. He gave this new sixth floor arches smaller than the ones below but larger than the ones above, and transferred some of the weighty stone detail from the fifth floor to the new sixth floor. The result was a composition that still seems rightly balanced, and you would probably never guess that the height had been extended if you had not seen the earlier drawing.

    The advertisement comes from J. F. Dieffenbacher’s Directory of Pittsburgh and Allegheny Cities, for 1888. Note the temporary address; the new building was still either under construction or in the planning stage.

  • Westinghouse Building

    Westinghouse Building

    The Westinghouse Building (now known by its street address, Eleven Stanwix) was designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, who completely changed Pittsburgh’s skyline in the years between the Second World War and the Postmodernist era of the 1980s.

    Entrance

    Years ago old Pa Pitt said that the building reminded him of two Mies van der Rohe buildings stacked one on top of another. The building has a Miesian colonnaded porch, but there is an essential difference, and the difference is in favor of Mies.

    Colonnaded porch

    In a Mies building, the porch creates a useful space that is a transition between outside and inside. You can set up tables on the porch if you like, and they will be out of the weather. People caught in a storm can run to the porch and be sheltered until security chases them back out into the rain. But here the porch is shallow and nearly useless. It does not provide shelter, and the space between the columns and the building is so tight that it eliminates the possibility of using the porch for much. The tables above are pleasant on a clear day, but they are exposed to the weather, and you would not want to sit there in the rain.

    Porch

    In fact, as insulting as it is to say this to a pair of distinguished modernists like Harrison & Abramovitz, this porch is merely decorative.

    Westinghouse Building

    We also have pictures of the Westinghouse building from Mount Washington, and from the Monongahela River.

  • Emsworth United Presbyterian Church

    Emsworth United Presbyterian Church

    In the late 1800s, frame churches with acres of shingles, like this one, went up all over the Pittsburgh area. Few have survived; most of them were later replaced by larger and more substantial buildings. Even fewer have survived with their shingles and wood siding intact. Although the congregation dissolved in 2022, this building has been taken over by a catering company that has kept it in original shape.

    Belfry
    Emsworth United Presbyterian Church
    Gable
    Emsworth United Presbyterian Church
    Side of the church
    Gable
    Service schedule
    Window
    Window
    Emsworth United Presbyterian Church

  • A Stroll on Vernon Drive in Washington Park, Mount Lebanon

    68 Vernon Drive

    Washington Park is one of those 1920s plans in Mount Lebanon that filled up with houses by different architects in different styles, until—like the others—it became a museum of the styles of the era. It’s part of the Mount Lebanon Historic District. This collection is the product of two walks on Vernon Drive, one just yesterday, and one back in May, so don’t be too surprised to see the seasons changing as we stroll.

    We begin with an outlier: a Mediterranean villa in a neighborhood where most of the houses range from Georgian to fairy-tale Northern European.

    68 Vernon Drive
    2 Vernon Drive
    20 Vernon Drive

    We have dozens more pictures to show you, which we’ll put below the metaphorical fold to keep from weighing down the front page.

    (more…)

  • St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church, Arlington

    St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church, Arlington

    This little Romanesque church on Arlington Avenue was converted to residential use with almost no alteration of the exterior.

    Welcome
    Window
    Tower
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

  • United Steelworkers Building

    Base of the United Steelworkers Building

    The “diagrid” construction of the United Steelworkers Building (originally the IBM Building) is unusual, both from an aesthetic and from an engineering standpoint. The grid is not just decorative: it holds up the building from the outside. The piers on which all that weight rests are dramatic from close up. The architects were Curtis and Davis of New Orleans; as far as old Pa Pitt knows, this is their only building in Pittsburgh.

    United Steelworkers Building
    One pier of the United Steelworkers Building
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    More pictures of the United Steelworkers Building from Gateway Center Park, from the Boulevard of the Allies, and from across the river.

  • St. Philip’s School, Crafton

    St. Philip’s School, Craftonm

    Designed by Albert F. Link, the original part of St. Philip’s School was built in 1914–19151 to look like a fairy-tale castle. The steep hillside site was probably an inspiration: anything built here would look a bit like a medieval fortress, so why not go all the way?

    Tower
    Tower
    Statue
    St. Philip’s School
    St. Philip’s School
    Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. Source: The Construction Record, December 19, 1914. “Architect A. F. Link, N. Craig street, has plans for the superstructure of a two-story brick parochial school building for St. Phillips [sic] Roman Catholic Congregation to be built at a cost of $60,000. Foundation work has been completed.” ↩︎

  • Merry Christmas

    Horne’s Christmas tree
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.