The Good Shepherd window at the rear of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Beechview Avenue, Beechview. The church building is a century old this year.
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Stained Glass in Beechview
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St. Bernard in Mount Lebanon
You can tell St. Bernard’s congregation is a community of well-off business types, because the church’s Web site has both a mission statement and a page of “goals and objectives.” But the building itself is quite beautiful, especially its gloriously colorful tile roof. The architect was William R. Perry, who also designed, on a somewhat smaller scale but with equally splendid taste, the bandstand in West End Park. These pictures were taken from the Mount Lebanon Cemetery.
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Grace Lutheran in Troy Hill
The narrow streets and sudden drops in Troy Hill make for some unusual adaptations. Stuffed into a tiny lot, Grace Lutheran Church is as tall as it is long, with its main sanctuary on the second floor. It’s impossible to get a picture of the building without wires in front, and removing the wires with an image editor would be dishonest, which is Father Pitt’s way of saying “too much work.”
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God and Mammon
The spire of Trinity Cathedral is dwarfed by the massive Oliver Building behind it, one of Daniel Burnham’s greatest gifts to Pittsburgh.
Trinity Cathedral is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.
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Immaculate Heart of Mary, Polish Hill
It is impossible to get a good picture of Immaculate Heart of Mary without a forest of cables in front of it. But part of the magnificence of the building is the way it rises up from an impossibly cramped and sloping lot in a crowded hillside neighborhood; it is more impressive because it can never be seen all at once.
The madly ambitious Polish railroad workers who built this church with their own hands chose a design that intentionally resembles St. Peter’s in Rome. The rest of the neighborhood is still modest and picturesquely shabby, but Immaculate Heart of Mary is a building that could easily pass for a cathedral.
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East Liberty Presbyterian Church
Franklin Toker, the architectural historian, says this may be, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America. Ralph Adams Cram (who may have been America’s greatest Gothic architect) designed it, and it was built with enormous donations of Mellon money, which is why locals know it as the Mellon Fire Escape. It dominates East Liberty from every angle. Above, a view from the south over the rooftops of East Liberty; below, the great central tower.
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Heinz Chapel, Inside and Out
Somehow Charles Z. Klauder managed to create perfectly Gothic buildings with an Art Deco sensibility in every detail. His Cathedral of Learning is the most perfect Gothic skyscraper in the world; it’s organically Gothic, not just a skyscraper with Gothic trimmings.
On the same ideally landscaped square in Oakland sits Heinz Chapel, Klauder’s last work, a building with more modest dimensions but more flamboyant ornament. Its lacy spire is a remarkable work of Gothic fantasy. Its transept windows, designed (like all the other stained glass in the building) by Charles J. Connick, are supposedly the tallest stained-glass windows in the world, or among the tallest, or rather tallish, depending on which source you consult. It’s one of Pittsburgh’s favorite wedding sites, and on a Saturday afternoon weddings follow one after another as though the brides were on a conveyor belt.
The cornerstone identifies the date in figures that perfectly match the Deco Gothic spirit of the building.
These photographs were taken with a Zorki-4 bearing a Jupiter-8 f/2 lens, which is a fine camera for a day out in the city. It’s versatile, it’s built like a Soviet tank, and the lens is sharp and fast (and interchangeable with any screwmount Leica lens). And there were literally millions made, so if it does break you can just get another one.
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A Hinge
One of the hinges on the great wooden doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland.
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Two More of St. Paul’s with a Toy Camera
The same drug-store digital camera, the same day, two more pictures. The view of the spire half-obscured by leaves suggests a poetic fantasy of a forgotten and immemorially ancient church. Or perhaps it suggests that a tree was in the way.
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St. Paul’s with a Toy Camera
It was one of those cheap digital cameras dangling from a hook in the drug store, but it takes pictures that, if you squint a bit, sort of remind you of the object the camera was pointed at. Here’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland as reflected in the glass of the Software Engineering Institute across the street:
And here are two more pictures of what would, liturgically speaking, be the west front of the cathedral, although geographically speaking it happens to be the south front:
One would prefer to use 120 film, or failing that 35-mm film, or failing that at least a better digital camera, but there are certain advantages to a camera nearly small enough to slip into a wallet. And the hazy glow from the cheap lens might be good for certain effects.