Currently part of Holy Apostles parish, St. Basil’s occupies a splendid hilltop site from which its great rose window can be seen for miles. St. Basil himself presides over the façade, imprisoned in a cage that keeps the pigeons out and St. Basil in.
More of St. Boniface on East Street. These pictures were taken with a Samsung Digimax V4, which was quite a camera in its day. Though it fits (lumpily) in a pocket, it has a Schneider-Kreuznach Varioplan lens and allows manual control of everything. It is also the slowest camera old Pa Pitt has ever used, and he includes folding roll-film cameras in that calculation. It is especially slow if you set it to save in uncompressed TIFF format; then the time between shots is about 45 seconds, during which one could probably expose a whole roll of 620 film in a 6×9 roll-film camera.
But Father Pitt has decided to make this limitation part of the artistic experience: he knows he will be taking one shot, and thus has a strong motivation to compose it carefully. He has also set the camera to black-and-white only, making it his dedicated monochrome camera. In effect he has turned it into a Leica Monochrom, but one with a 4-megapixel sensor instead of a 40-megapixel sensor. It is in fact nowhere near a Leica Monochrom, but it does take pretty good pictures. And Father Pitt paid about $8 for it instead of $8,000, so he believes his money was well spent.
Three different carved capitals at the entrance to St. Boniface Church on East Street.
An isolated survivor of the once-populous East Street Valley, this splendid church (designed by A. F. Link and completed in 1926) was spared by a slight rerouting of the Parkway North. Since the latest reorganization in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, this is now part of Christ Our Savior parish.
The picture above is fairly large if you click on it; it’s a composite of eight separate photographs.
One of old Pa Pitt’s many regrets is that he did not buy this old church on Rhine Street in Spring Hill, merely to preserve its unique Art Nouveau façade. Behind the façade was a pedestrian frame building clinging to the side of the hill, but the façade itself was not quite like anything else in Pittsburgh. This picture was taken in 1999; the church was demolished some time after 2016, when the abandoned hulk still appears in Google Street View. The stained glass probably still exists somewhere; it was removed before the building was demolished.
There are two Ukrainian churches in Carnegie. The Catholic one is an enlarged Quonset hut. This one is an Art Nouveau interpretation of traditional Ukrainian architecture by the Hungarian architect Titus de Bobula. Together with its next-door neighbor, the Russian Orthodox church, it makes this corner of Carnegie look exotically East European.
The effect is even more curious when the distinctively Ukrainian domes are seen through a distinctively American maze of utility cables.
A small but very tasteful church (finished in 1909) that faces the beautiful expanse of West Park across North Avenue. The architect, according to this brochure, was Robert Maurice Trimble, a native of Allegheny.
In old-postcard colors, a view of the front steps of St. Paul Cathedral in Oakland.
Like most of the other churches on the South Side, this one—at 15th and Roland Streets—has been repurposed, in this case as a studio. But its outward appearance has hardly changed.
Like many other churches on the South Side, this one is becoming loft apartments. The exterior, at any rate, will be preserved.
Camera: Canon PowerShot 590 IS.
Addendum: The architect was Marius Rousseau, according to the parish’s Golden Jubilee book.
