Father Pitt

Category: Cemeteries

  • Stained Glass in the Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum

    America the Beautiful
    “America the Beautiful,” by Katherine Lee Bates.

    The Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum is now advertised as the Temple of Memories, because our taste has gone in that direction. It’s a very large communal mausoleum, built in 1960, and walking through the doors feels like going through a time portal into the end of the Eisenhower era. By far the most striking feature of the mausoleum is the series of stained-glass windows by Willet in Philadelphia and Hunt in Pittsburgh. They are some of the best modern stained glass in Pittsburgh, and they commemorate great triumphs of religious literature and music. We have a lot of large pictures here, so we’ll put them behind a “read more” link to avoid weighing down the front page.

    (more…)

  • Tribute to Andy Warhol

    Grave of Andy Warhol festooned with soup cans
    Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.

    The grave of Andy Warhol, with the usual offerings, in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, Bethel Park. In the background a gravedigger is finishing a fresh grave.

  • Gatehouse, Mount Lebanon Cemetery

    Gatehouse at the Mt. Lebanon Cemetery

    The gatehouse for the Mount Lebanon Cemetery is a well-preserved vernacular-Gothic frame house. Not all the details have survived—the ugly front door is certainly not original—but more of the original decoration is preserved than we usually see on houses of this type in our area.

    Gable and chimneys
    Chimney
    Roof bracket
    Porch bracket
    Gatehouse
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

  • Chapel, Office, and Gatehouse at the Homewood Cemetery

    Tower of Homewood Cemetery Chapel

    Albert Spahr of MacClure & Spahr designed the chapel, the administration building, and the gatehouse for the Homewood Cemetery in a Perpendicular Gothic style. (Mr. MacClure had already died, but his name remained at the head of the firm.) The effect is to make us think of our ideal image of an English village.

    Office and chapel
    Chapel
    Chapel
    Chapel with trees
    Tower entrance to the chapel
    Inscription: Anno Domini MCMXXII
    Lantern
    Flower and foliage
    Hinge

    The doors have impressive iron hinges and pulls.

    Door pull
    Tower clock

    Here is an extraordinarily rare thing: a tower clock that is keeping accurate time.

    Office

    The administration building.

    Office
    Office entrance
    Gatehouse

    The gatehouse appears to have been expanded by a third on the right; the seam is only just visible in the front, but much more obvious in the rear.

    Rear of the gatehouse
    Rear of the gatehouse

    Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Maple and Stag

  • Penn Avenue Gatehouse, Allegheny Cemtery

    Shortened tower

    If you are not a frequent visitor to Allegheny Cemetery, you might pass the Penn Avenue gatehouse and wonder whether your memory is playing tricks on you. Isn’t there something…different about it?

    Your memory is not playing tricks on you. Here is a picture from 2021:

    Penn Avenue Gatehouse in 2021

    What old Pa Pitt was told was that engineers had determined that the tower was dangerously unstable. The stones were carefully taken apart and labeled, and maybe someday the tower will be restored.

  • Some Recent Cemetery Pictures

    Louis Knoepp Monument

    Louis Knoepp monument, St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery, Mount Oliver.

    In honor of All Hallows’ Eve, a few pictures from Father Pitt’s recent expeditions to cemeteries. Many more similar pictures can be found at Pittsburgh Cemeteries, the site devoted to the art and architecture of death.

    Columbarium

    Receiving vault (now the Columbarium), Union Dale Cemetery.

    Hemphill mausoleum

    Hemphill mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery.

    Rook monument

    Rook monument, Allegheny Cemetery.

    Rudel obelisk

    Rudel obelisk, St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery, Mount Oliver.

    Vallowe angel
    Aull-Martin monument, Homewood Cemetery

    Aull-Martin monument, Homewood Cemetery.

    Fall landscape, St. Paul’s Cemetery

    Fall Landscape, St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery, Mount Oliver.

  • Fall Colors in the Homewood Cemetery

    Autumn colors in the Homewood Cemetery

    The Homewood Cemetery was planted as an arboretum, so it is one of the best places in Pittsburgh to see a wide variety of trees in a wide variety of colors.

    Fall landscape
    Statue on the Aull–Martin Monument
    Hemphill mausoleum

  • Daniel O’Neill Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    This article on the Daniel O’Neill monument appears at Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Cemeteries, but he thought his regular readers here might also enjoy seeing the portrait of an important figure in Pittsburgh’s literary history.

    Close-up of the face on the Daniel O’Neill portrait statue

    An editor’s work is never done. Here is Daniel O’Neill, owner and editor of the Dispatch, still at work 145 years after his death in 1877. Though he died at the young age of 47, he had already built the Dispatch into Pittsburgh’s most respected newspaper, a position it held until the great newspaper massacre of the early 1920s, when paper shortages and rising costs forced hundreds or thousands of papers across the country out of business. Before that there had been at least a dozen English dailies in Pittsburgh, not to mention three in German and several in other languages.

    From the hill opposite

    The monument itself is a harmoniously eclectic mix of styles in the Victorian manner: classical elements dominate, but Mr. O’Neill’s desk rests on an Egyptian pedestal.

    From the front
    Daniel O’Neill hard at work
    The full statue
    Inscription on the monument
    Face, three-quarters view

  • Concord Presbyterian Church and Cemetery, Carrick

    Concord Presbyterian Church

    This building was dedicated in 1915, but its congregation was organized in 1831—and really dates from before that, since local members had been meeting before the Presbytery recognized them as a church. This was a country church that was engulfed by city in the early 1900s; in its old country churchyard are the graves of a number of early settlers and the third mayor of Pittsburgh.

    In black and white
    From the churchyard

    Addendum: The architect of the church was George Schwan. From the Construction Record for October 11, 1913: “Architect George Schwan, Peoples Bank building, is working on plans for the proposed church building, for the Concord Presbyterian Congregation, Carrick. The building will be one-story, either brick or stone, and cover an area of 72×90 feet. Cost $35,000.”