Lillian Russell may be the most celebrated beauty in the history of the United States.
Her fourth and last husband was a Pittsburgh newspaperman, which earned her a mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery. On Valentine’s Day, someone left glass pebbles spelling out “I love you” in front of the door.
Mr. O’Neill is possibly the only resident of the Allegheny Cemetery who is still working at a desk job post mortem. Eugene O’Neill is buried nearby, but not any Eugene O’Neill you know.
The Frick Art Museum in Point Breeze was built as a home for Helen Clay Frick’s art collection. It’s a small collection, but chosen with good taste–a Boucher here, a Reynolds there, and a roomful of priceless medieval religious art. The building itself is less than forty years old, but the timeless design could easily have been a Renaissance palace.
East Liberty Presbyterian Church dominates East Liberty from every angle. It was designed by the great Ralph Adams Cram, and, per square foot, it may be the most expensive church ever built in America. Because Mellon money built it, perhaps to atone for some of the sins inevitable on the road to becoming the richest family on earth, locals call it the Mellon Fire Escape.
Looking up from under the rotunda of Penn Station, which is now converted to apartments and offices. If you want to catch a train, you have to go out back by the trash cans, where a small modern station has been grafted onto the main building.
First Presbyterian Church sits on Sixth Avenue next to Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) and just across the street from the Duquesne Club. These are the bastions of old money in Pittsburgh, and plenty of that money went into the elaborate Gothic ornamentation of the church building, not to mention its famous stained glass by Tiffany.
Manchester is a relatively poor neighborhood rich in Victorian architecture. Nowhere else in Pittsburgh are there so many uninterrupted blocks of Victorian rowhouses with elaborate front porches. The restoration of the neighborhood was a pet project of Richard Mellon Scaife, the eccentric billionaire owner of the Tribune-Review.
The elaborate entrance portal to Highland Park at the end of Highland Avenue could never be made today. Think of the protests! It would be called a waste of money, an exploitation of women, or even obscene. In Victorian times, it was probably called “beautiful,” but that is an outmoded form of discourse.
A headless statue accumulated from somewhere, now standing up to its neck in Boston ivy outside the Mattress Factory art museum.
