Father Pitt

Category: History

  • Charles Taze Russell Grave and Pyramid

    Father Pitt has just published this article on his Pittsburgh Cemeteries site, but he thought it might also be of interest to students of local history in general.

    “Pastor Russell,” as his followers called him, founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and the International Bible Students Association, the organization that—after various schisms and defections—came to be known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was born in Allegheny (now the North Side), and when he died he was buried in what is now (after a number of changes of ownership) the Rosemont, Mt. Hope, & Evergreen United Cemeteries in Ross Township.

    His fairly modest grave monument includes a photograph of Pastor Russell, lovingly preserved (and perhaps replaced more than once over the years).

    Note the inscription identifying Pastor Russell as the Laodicean Messenger, or “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans,” as the King James Bible translates it (Revelation 3:14). Russell’s followers believed that he himself was that angel or messenger.

    Russell died in 1916. In 1921, some of his followers erected a showier monument in the form of a pyramid. One of Russell’s odd beliefs was that the Great Pyramid in Egypt was designed by God himself as a prophecy in stone. Like most such prophecies, it was meant to be uninterpretable until the correct clever interpreter came along—in this case, Pastor Russell.

    This is actually one of the few cemetery pyramids in the Pittsburgh area whose proportions are Egyptian rather than classical Roman. It is meant to have the same proportions as the Great Pyramid, and in particular the capstone is carefully proportioned to match the Great Pyramid’s capstone, which in Pastor Russell’s interpretation represents the Christ.

    The pyramid was meant as a marker not only for Russell, but for a number of other members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, who owned this plot in the cemetery. A few names are inscribed in the open Bibles on the four sides of the pyramid, but most of the blank space was never used. It seems that the separate ownership of this plot has been preserved through the various changes of ownership the rest of the cemetery has gone through.

  • Schenley High School in 1916

    Grant Boulevard (now Bigelow Boulevard) Front.

    Abandoned for some time because it would have been too costly to restore for use by students, this magnificent building by Edward Stotz may soon be luxury apartments for yuppies. Here we see it as it was when it was newly built in 1916, from the Year Book of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club.

    Rear.

    Main Entrance Hall.

    Would you like to build your own Schenley High School? Here are the original plans:

  • Design for the City-County Building

    This rendering was published in 1916, before the building opened in 1917; but this is how the City-County Building still looks today. “Diamond Street” is now part of Forbes Avenue, except for the remnant of the outer end that veers off Forbes for one scraggly diagonal block to meet Fifth Avenue.

  • Belmar Theater, Homewood

    This movie house was newly built in 1915, when this picture was published. It was open until the late 1960s; it was torn down in the 1970s.

  • The Regent Theater, Newly Built

    From a movie trade magazine of 1915 we take this interesting article about the newly opened Regent in East Liberty, now the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. Click on the image for a much larger version.

    “The foyer is decorated in the Adams period” probably means in the Adam style—that is, the neoclassical style made popular by the Adam brothers in the 1700s and undergoing a revival in the early twentieth century.

    The picture below shows how the theater looks today: stripped of its projecting awning, but otherwise very much the same.

  • Wm. G. Johnston & Co. Building

    William G. Johnston & Co. was a very successful printing and bookbinding firm that put up this building on Ninth Street at Penn Avenue in 1886. Mr. Johnston would probably be pleased to see that his building looks very much as it did when he knew it, except that—like every other building downtown—it is doubtless cleaner. If you look very closely, you may see a small stitching error, which comes from the fact that this picture is put together from multiple photographs. The lesson, obviously, is not to look so closely.

    Addendum: Through various permutations, the William G. Johnston Company was the successor of Zadok Cramer, one of the very early printers and booksellers in Pittsburgh, who began his business here in 1800.

  • Two Movie Theaters in 1912

    From Motion Picture World, 1912.

    Father Pitt does not know the exact location of either of these establishments. The fact that the Casino was remarkable for having been in the same place for eight years shows how temporary these early theaters often were. Pittsburgh, of course, invented the movie theater, and by 1912 no neighborhood was complete without one. The larger ones, like the Casino below, also booked vaudeville acts.

    From Motion Picture World, 1912.

  • John White Alexander

    A good number of artists have been born in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, and some of them even have large museums here dedicated to their works. (Father Pitt is thinking, of course, of the John A Hermann, Jr., Memorial Art Museum in Bellevue. What were you thinking of?) But we could argue that the one who made the most lasting contribution to the city of his own free will was John White Alexander, whose mural composition Apotheosis of Pittsburgh covers thousands of square feet in the splendid Grand Staircase in the Carnegie. Alexander was born in Allegheny in 1856, and the Grand Staircase was his last significant work, so we can say that he began and ended his work here. A rather fawning (but perhaps justifiably so) 1908 article in The International Studio describes the high position he had reached in the world of art, and gives us good monochrome reproductions of a number of Alexander’s works, especially portraits. Here is an album of those pictures, in tribute to one of Pittsburgh’s great artists.

    Portrait of Mrs. H.

    Portrait of Fritz (Frits) Thaulow.

    Portrait: Sisters.

    Portrait of Walt Whitman.

    Portrait of Miss R.

    Pen Sketch of Mark Twain.

    Portrait of Miss B.

    Portrait of Mrs. R.

    Fragment of Decoration, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

  • Moving a House Straight Up

    Raising a Full House

    Updated update: The link in the comment by “Zak” no longer works, but you can see a fine hand-colored version of this image here.

    Moving the Captain Samuel Brown House—The greatest house-moving feat ever accomplished

    This is the same photograph, but note how the debris at the bottom has been edited out. Yes, people could do that before Photoshop. There is also a photograph from the side.

    From the vanished page to which Zak referred we learned that this house burned in 1913; it would have been on the Pittsburgh side of the river opposite where the Waterfront is now. The contractors who moved the house, John Eichelay Jr. Co., specialized in moving buildings, though even they considered this one a remarkable feat. The same company, in 1945, got the contract for moving the first atom bomb.

    For historical reasons, we keep the original version of the article below.

    From the Booklovers Magazine in 1904. Can anyone identify this house or its exact location? The text below is all Father Pitt has to go on, which tells us that it is somewhere in the Mon Valley near Pittsburgh, but not exactly where. We do not know, for example, whether “about ten miles from Pittsburgh” means ten miles along the river or ten miles as the crow flies. Ten miles along the river would put the house in Homestead or thereabouts.

    Raising a Full House text

  • The Building of Pittsburgh

    A whole issue of the Architectural Record in 1911 is devoted to “The Building of Pittsburgh.” It is a treasury of information on many of the splendid buildings still standing here, as well as a few that have vanished.