Two soldiers at Fort Pitt wait for the French and Indians to show their faces, or—failing that—tourists. Below, an officer explains what makes things go boom.
-
Ready for the French and Indians
-
Portal Bridge
This bridge carries eight lanes of expressway traffic over the entrance to Point Park. It was also designed to make entering and leaving Point Park a dramatic experience. Under the bridge is a footbridge over an artificial pond, and as we cross the footbridge on the way in, the Point Fountain becomes visible; on the way out, the skyline opens up to us.
-
Interior of Trinity Cathedral
Trinity Episcopal Cathedral was built in 1872 from a design by Gordon W. Lloyd, an English-born Canadian architect who was popular among Episcopalians. The view above is made up of three pictures to give us a broad view of the nave.
This is the third church for this congregation. The first was the “Round Church,” built at about the time the streets were laid out in their present plan in 1785. (It was actually an octagon—one of the first generation of odd-shaped buildings caused by the colliding grids along Liberty Avenue.) The second was a brick Gothic church built in 1824.
Note the divided pews, which are the original furniture from 1872. At the time this church was built, churches were generally funded by pew rents. Your family would rent a particular section, and that was where you sat every Sunday.
The number on the end of the pew identifies your section. When Father Pitt visited, the dean of the cathedral, the Very Reverend Aidan Smith, was kind enough to bring out a precious historical artifact: a pew chart of the previous church marked with the prices for each section. The closer to the front (and the more visible) the pew, the more it cost per annum. He explained that this cathedral stopped the practice of pew rents in the 1930s, after receiving a large legacy on the condition that pew rents would be stopped. (In addition to funding the church, they were a good, but arguably un-Christian, way of keeping out the undesirable poor.)
-
Gateway Towers
It seems to old Pa Pitt that the word to describe this kind of building is “adequate.” Some modernist buildings certainly deserve to be called elegant; we need look no further than One Gateway Center in the background for an example of an elegant, even inspiring, modernist design. Gateway Towers, on the other hand, is rectangular, and once one has said that one has nearly exhausted the subject. It opened in 1964, and it must be a delightful place to live, with Point Park for its back yard and views in all directions. But it is hard to imagine anyone being inspired or delighted by this apartment tower. It was designed by Emery Roth, most of whose works are in New York; this is the only one Father Pitt knows of in Pittsburgh.
-
Grant Street in 2000
Photographed on Elite Chrome 100 film with a Kodak Retinette.
-
Three Rivers Arts Festival
This year the Arts Festival has taken over Penn Avenue and cross streets in the Cultural District.
-
View from the Rotunda of Penn Station in 2000
A view from the rotunda of Penn Station, taken in 2000 with an Argus A, a 35-millimeter camera made by the Argus Camera Company in the 1930s. It was meant to capitalize on the popularity of the very expensive Leica without being anything like as expensive as the Leica. It is not a particularly good camera, but it is small, and it is durable, and if you treat it right you can get pictures like this out of it.
-
414 First Avenue
There is almost nothing distinctive about this building, but Father Pitt would be very sorry to lose it. It is a very good example of a simple commercial building of the early twentieth century. The subtle decorative details are tasteful without ostentation. The ghost sign preserves some of the building’s commercial history. The ground floor has been unsympathetically altered, but the alterations are superficial and could be reverted without too much expense.
-
Grant Building from First Avenue
When Henry Hornbostel’s Grant Building first went up in 1929, it was festooned with Art Deco pinnacles that were removed decades ago. If you enlarge this picture of the south side of the building, you can just make out the shadows left by those vanished ornaments.
-
Fifth Avenue in the 1990s
Father Pitt is not quite sure when he took this picture (some of his records are in a sorry state of disorganization), but it is easy to give it a rough date. In the middle distance we can see the Farmers Bank Building, with its mural of Pittsburgh sports legends by Judy Penzer, an artist who had the good luck to be the sister of a real-estate developer, and the bad luck to be on TWA Flight 800 when it exploded in 1996. That mural was painted in 1992, and the building was imploded in 1997 to make way for the new Lazarus department store.
The Farmers Bank Building was a great loss to our architectural legacy, but we could argue that it had been lost for three decades by the time it was demolished. It was built in 1903, one of our earliest batch of skyscrapers.
In the 1960s, the owners covered the embarrassingly passé Beaux-Arts exterior with a generic modernist shell, making the building indistinguishable from other International Style boxes except for being uglier. When the building was scheduled for demolition, there was some argument about whether the original exterior could be restored; but the indomitably bland personality of Mayor Murphy overcame all opposition to his project to fill downtown with department stores. Tom Murphy was a brilliant politician, probably the most powerful mayor since David Lawrence, but in this case he was badly misguided. Lazarus failed in a few years, and soon downtown went from four department stores to none at all.
