Father Pitt

Category: Lawrenceville

  • Episcopal Church Home, Lawrenceville

    Episcopal Church Home

    James T. Steen designed this building, whose cornerstone was laid in 1892. It was a home for orphans and aged women, at a time when Pittsburgh’s industry was mass-producing widows and orphans. It is still a home for the aged under the name Canterbury Place.

    Cornerstone
    Episcopal Church Home

    The most striking feature of the building is its flamboyantly Baroque entrance. Old maps show us that it was once in the middle of a nearly symmetrical façade, but the right wing was demolished to make way for the modern high-rise section.

    Entrance
    Entrance
    Entrance
    Side of the building
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The local historians Joann Cantrell and James Wudarczyk have written a book on Pittsburgh’s Orphans and Orphanages that gathers firsthand memories of many of these institutions and shows us that, in spite of the inevitable institutionalism of the facilities, most of them were not the Dickensian nightmares we imagine when we hear the word “orphanage.”

  • Alley in Lawrenceville

    Garden Way in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsbugh
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Garden Way, looking eastward toward Children’s Hospital.

  • J. K. Wymard Sidewalk Plaque, Lawrenceville

    J. K. Wymard Paving, Pittsburg
    J. K. WYMARD PAVING PITTSBURG

    How old is your sidewalk? Quite possibly more than a century old. The spelling “Pittsburg” was federally official between 1891 and 1911, and though some institutions continued to use the shorter form after the spelling officially reverted to “Pittsburgh,” the lettering on this bronze plaque is very much a nineteenth-century style. The Pittsburgh Orbit site featured this plaque a few years ago in its roundup of sidewalk plaques; the editor there is of the opinion that the sidewalk could not be more than a century old, but old Pa Pitt is of the opinion that well-laid concrete is forever. Especially if you repair the segments that crumble too much.

    Sidewalk of Penn Avenue, Lawrenceville
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Front Porches on Main Street, Lawrenceville

    Front porches with Victorian woodwork

    An experiment with the 50-megapixel phone camera, cropped to 39 megapixels. The noise reduction is smeary at full magnification, especially because the houses had to be brightened considerably (while leaving the sky correctly exposed, which we accomplished in the GIMP through the magic of layers). But on the whole it is a pleasing if somewhat artificial picture, and old Pa Pitt is not ashamed to use this phone camera every once in a while.

  • 43rd Street Presbyterian Church, Lawrenceville

    Front of the 43rd Street Presbyterian Church

    Built in 1883, this church now belongs to the New Bethel Baptist Church. It is typical of its era, but unusual in preserving its octagonal steeple.

    For some reason these pictures got lost in the piles of photographs old Pa Pitt is always stacking up here and there. They were taken in September of 2022.

    Date stone: Built A. D. 1883. 43. ST. Presbyterian Church.
    43rd Street Presbyterian Church
    Tower and steeple
    New Bethel Baptist Church

    Perhaps Father Pitt held off on publishing these pictures because he was debating whether he should do something about that jungle of utility cables. The cables won that debate.

  • Penn Avenue Gatehouse, Allegheny Cemtery

    Shortened tower

    If you are not a frequent visitor to Allegheny Cemetery, you might pass the Penn Avenue gatehouse and wonder whether your memory is playing tricks on you. Isn’t there something…different about it?

    Your memory is not playing tricks on you. Here is a picture from 2021:

    Penn Avenue Gatehouse in 2021

    What old Pa Pitt was told was that engineers had determined that the tower was dangerously unstable. The stones were carefully taken apart and labeled, and maybe someday the tower will be restored.

  • Italianate Commercial Building, Lawrenceville

    An unusually attractive building on Butler Street at the corner of Main Street. Note the folk-art wood carving in the trim.

  • Mellon Bank, Lawrenceville

    In the 1960s, Mellon Bank built a number of modernist bank branches that reinterpreted traditional bank architecture in modern forms. Here the classical colonnade is simplified to a schematic.

  • Woolslair Public School, Bloomfield/Lawrenceville

    Woolslair Public School

    This fine Renaissance palace, built in 1897, was designed by Samuel T. McClaren. It sits on 40th Street at Liberty Avenue, where it is technically—according to city planning maps—in Bloomfield. Most Pittsburghers, however, would probably call this section of Bloomfield “Lawrenceville,” since it sticks like a thumb into lower Lawrenceville, and the Lawrenceville line runs along two edges of the school’s lot.

    For some reason the style of this building is listed as “Romanesque revival” wherever we find it mentioned on line. Old Pa Pitt will leave it up to his readers: is this building, with its egg-and-dart decorations, false balconies, and Trajanesque inscriptions, anything other than a Victorian interpretation of a Renaissance interpretation of classical architecture? Now, if you had said “Rundbogenstil,” Father Pitt might have accepted it, because he likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”

    Entrance
    Front
    Northern side

  • Arsenal Bank Building

    We saw the 1884 Arsenal Bank earlier from across Butler Street. Here is the 43rd Street side of the building, which we can see clearly thanks to the disappearance years ago of the neighboring buildings.