Ginkgo biloba is a tree often planted for its beautiful form and its resistance to the thousand natural shocks that trees are heir to in the city. In the fall, its leaves turn a brilliant golden yellow, and then within a very short time they all fall and carpet the ground with gold. These trees were just beginning to push the eject button in the South Side Cemetery in Carrick.
A Halloween stroll in the Homewood Cemetery with Frankencamera.
A stroll in Union Dale Cemetery with Frankencamera.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
The doors have impressive iron hinges and pulls.
Here is an extraordinarily rare thing: a tower clock that is keeping accurate time.
The administration building.
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.
Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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:
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.
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.
Receiving vault (now the Columbarium), Union Dale Cemetery.
Hemphill mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery.
Rook monument, Allegheny Cemetery.
Rudel obelisk, St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery, Mount Oliver.
Aull-Martin monument, Homewood Cemetery.
Fall Landscape, St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery, Mount Oliver.
