Father Pitt

Author: Father Pitt

  • Shadyside Presbyterian Church

    Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

    Designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, the successors to H. H. Richardson, this church has an honest Richardsonian pedigree to go with its Richardsonian Romanesque style.

    Can you tell that old Pa Pitt is enjoying his new software toy? The picture above is a wide-angle shot stitched together from nine separate photographs. The fisheye view below is stitched together from six; if you click on it, you can have it at about 38 megapixels.

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.

    Finally, here’s a picture from the north side of the church, where there is room to get far away enough to take the picture all in one shot.

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.

  • Oakmont Victorian

    Oakmont is proud of its collection of Victorian houses, most of them frame structures on the respectable and impressive end of the Victorian spectrum rather than the whimsical and gingerbready end. Here is an album of a few of Oakmont’s fine houses.

  • The Sauer Buildings in Aspinwall

    Frederick Sauer was a very reliable church architect responsible for many of Pittsburgh’s better Catholic churches, including St. Mary of the Mount. Nothing about his churches would stamp him as an eccentric; he gave his clients exactly the respectable buildings they wanted. But he had a streak of whimsy in him. He bought a large tract of land on the hill over Aspinwall and designed a very conventional and respectable house for himself. Then he started to play in the back yard. Beginning with his chicken coop, for example, he added fairy-tale projections and curious details, building up and out until he had made an apartment building, the Heidelberg Apartments (above). He did much of the building with his own hands, eventually creating half a dozen or so curious structures back in the woods behind his house. They now form the Sauer Buildings Historic District—one of those curious Pittsburgh treasures probably known less to Pittsburghers than to the rest of the world, where they are often mentioned as one of the most interesting flights of architectural eccentricity in America.

  • Carnegie Library, Oakmont

    This charming building from 1900 was tastefully expanded in 2006. The new section is obviously of our century, but so well harmonized with the old that it seems an organic growth.

  • St. Mary of the Mount

    Here is a huge picture of the front of St. Mary of the Mount on Grandview Avenue, Mount Washington. It’s made from eight individual pictures, all cleverly sewn together by Hugin. If you click on the picture, you can enlarge it to 4,692 × 6,569 pixels, or about 30 megapixels. (It could have been larger, but old Pa Pitt decided that 30 megapixels was probably large enough.) Many thanks to Wikimedia Commons for being willing to host huge pictures at such a level of detail.

    The architect was Frederick Sauer, whose conventionally attractive churches do nothing to prepare us for the eccentric whimsy he could produce when he let his imagination run wild.

  • It’s Snowing Downtown

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.

    And here’s the proof. Note the ice on the Monongahela, except for a channel wide enough for barge trains.

    Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

  • Chatham Village

    Another dip into the archives: some pictures of Chatham Village from 2005. Since the place hardly changes at all, they are current for practical purposes.

    Chatham Village was a New-Deal-era utopian community, designed to be attractive cheap housing for the working classes. It was so attractive, in fact, that it is now more valuable than the neighborhood that surrounds it on Mount Washington.

    The community owns the Bigham House, a fine 1844 farmhouse now used for community events and residents’ parties.

    Old Pa Pitt was shocked to discover that Wikimedia Commons had very few pictures of Chatham Village. His own were taken at glorious 1-megapixel resolution, and they were huge compared to the other ones in the Commons collection. So he has donated all these pictures to Wikimedia Commons under the CC0 do-what-you-like license.

    Camera: Fujifilm FinePix 2650.

  • Pennsylvania Trolley Museum

    From Father Pitt’s archives, a picture taken before his Web site existed. This is a Philadelphia PCC car, decorated for a birthday party, waiting for passengers at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum.

    The museum has a large collection of trolleys from all over North America, but most of the ones from outside Pennsylvania must be modified to run on the museum’s track, which is Pennsylvania Broad Gauge. Both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia still use a non-standard gauge, because in the nineteenth century the Pennsylvania legislature, fearing that streetcar companies might do back-door deals with the railroads that would end with huge locomotives running down the middle of the street, made it illegal for streetcar companies to use standard-gauge track. (It seems that Philadelphia trolleys actually use a gauge a quarter-inch narrower than the Pittsburgh gauge, and Father Pitt has no idea how much modification they require to run on the ever-so-slightly broader gauge.)

    Camera: Fujifilm FinePix 2650.

  • Chimney at Sunset

    Another moving still picture, this one of sunset light on steam rising from a chimney in Beechview.

  • Deer Discovers Apple Core, Judges It Favorably

    Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.