Father Pitt

Category: History

  • 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.

  • Old St. Luke’s

    Father Pitt is especially fond of Old St. Luke’s, partly for its history (its congregation was at the center of the Whiskey Rebellion), but mostly for its situation in a picturesque country churchyard.

  • Woodville Plantation

    Under layers of later accretions is a Revolution-era house that belonged to the Neville family. When General Neville, an old Washington crony, was appointed collector of the Washington administration’s very unpopular whiskey tax in 1794, the Whiskey Rebellion broke out: rioters burned Bower Hill, General Neville’s home, and he fled for his life to this house, which belonged to his son.

    This was a southern gentleman’s house: the Nevilles were from Virginia, and settled here in Yohogania County when Virginia claimed this part of the world. They kept slaves in the 1700s; Pennsylvania abolished slavery in stages.

    The house has been lovingly restored and is now a museum open Sunday afternoons. Inside, among many treasures, is an original 1815 Clementi pianoforte, bought for the house in 2006.

  • The Great Floyd Gun, Cast at the Fort Pitt Foundry, Pittsburgh

    From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 25, 1860. —Knapp, Rudd, & Co. cast this thing, which was considered one of the wonders of the age.

  • Old St. Luke’s

    This colonial-era congregation in what is now Scott Township found itself at the center of the Whiskey Rebellion, which began when General John Neville, a church member and an old pal of President Washington’s, was appointed tax collector. The current stone building was put up in 1852, but the congregation was founded in 1765.

  • Brewer’s Block, Fifth Avenue

    brewer-s-block

    This imposing (for 1860) edifice seems to have stood at the lower end of Fifth Avenue. From a Directory of Pittsburg and Allegheny Cities for 1860-1861.