The new portals for the Liberty Tubes are nearly finished, and they look splendid—almost exactly the way they looked when the tunnels opened in 1924. The unfortunate mid-century boxes are now only a memory.
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Liberty Tunnels, South Portal
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Old St. Luke’s, Woodville
Old St. Luke’s Church in the little village of Woodville (an unincorporated part of Scott Township) was founded in 1765. It was stuck in the middle of the Whiskey Rebellion, which divided the congregation, one of whose members was General John Neville, a tax collector who barely escaped with his life. (Woodville Plantation, the house to which he escaped, is still standing nearby.)
The current building dates from 1852. In the burying ground surrounding the little stone church are some very old graves, including some Revolutionary War veterans and “the first white child born in the Chartiers Valley.” The oldest stones were native shale, which is a very poor material for gravestones; but some of the obliterated inscriptions have been duplicated in plaques beside the stones.
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Fall Colors
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Giant Puffballs
There’s something impressive about a mushroom bigger than a soccer ball. These giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) appeared on a wooded hillside in Mount Lebanon, near a pile of decaying wood. Squirrels or chipmunks seem to have been nibbling at them as they grew, which gives them pockmarked surfaces that make them look like asteroids.
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Pittsburgh in 1916
From the Rotarian magazine, May, 1916. Note the skyline filled with beaux-arts classical towers, most of which are still here today, although they are dwarfed by more modern skyscrapers..
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A Skyscraper Rises
The new Tower at PNC Plaza will be our tallest skyscraper since the boom of the 1980s, when four of our five tallest buildings went up. The new building will be our seventh-tallest when it is completed, bumping the Cathedral of Learning down to eighth-tallest. It’s supposed to be “the world’s greenest skyscraper,” and it will be full of the latest green tech. But it all starts with the same steel cage that has formed the basis of almost every tall building since the 1890s.
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Carpenter Log House, Boyce Park
The Carpenter Log House was built about 1820, according to the sign in front of it. Log houses like this are surprisingly abundant here even now; often they are encrusted with later siding, and no one suspects the logs underneath until renovations have to be done.
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Fall Colors
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Telamones on the Park Building
The Park Building, designed by George B. Post and built in 1896, is a feast of classical detailing, and probably our oldest existing skyscraper, depending on our definition of “skyscraper.” (The Conestoga Building, built in 1892, is our earliest steel-cage building, but it is only seven storeys high.)
No one knows for sure who sculpted the row of telamones that hold up the roof, but it is certainly one of Pittsburgh’s most memorable and yet most neglected sights—neglected because few pedestrians ever look up to see the figures glowering down at them.
The Park Building is at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street, a short walk from either Steel Plaza or Wood Street subway station.
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Country Road
A country road near Wexford, not yet lined with townhouse developments and strip malls. Milkweeds are turning yellow and maples are turning red.
