Father Pitt

Category: North Side

  • St. Peter’s Church, North Side

    This splendid old church may look a bit prouder than the ordinary Catholic parish church, and it has every right to its pride: for a little more than a decade, it was the cathedral for the Diocese of Allegheny. In 1876 the rapidly growing Diocese of Pittsburgh was split, with Allegheny (then an independent city) as the seat of the new diocese. It was a bad plan from the beginning: Allegheny had all the wealthiest parishes, but Pittsburgh was generously allowed to keep all the debt. The shockingly un-Christian infighting that resulted ended only in 1889, when the Diocese of Allegheny was suppressed. But a Catholic diocese isn’t that easy to get rid of, and there is still a titular Bishop of Allegheny. He lives in Newark, where in his day job he is auxiliary bishop of the diocese there.

    St. Peter’s is just across Arch Street from the National Aviary, a short walk from the North Side subway station.

    Addendum: This church was built in 1872; the architect was Andrew Peebles, who also designed First English Lutheran downtown.

  • IBM Building, Allegheny Center

    Commonly attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, this building seems actually to have been designed by a less famous architect, Bruno P. Conterato, who worked for Mies’ firm, according to a correction made to this Post-Gazette article. That would explain the startling departure from Mies’ usual style. Almost all of Mies’ most famous buildings are black boxes on stilts, but this one is a white box on stilts. IBM no longer lives here, so the building is now known simply as Four Allegheny  Center.

    Allegheny Center is a short walk from the North Side subway station.

  • New Subway: Allegheny

    Between North Side and Allegheny the subway comes up out of the ground and rises to a viaduct past Heinz Field, until it ends (for now) at Allegheny between the casino and the Science Center. Allegheny is thus one of our two fully elevated stations (Fallowfield, which juts out over the edge of a cliff, is mostly elevated), the other being First Avenue. It’s an attractive station whose best feature is its entrance, which actually looks as pure and sharp as an architect’s conceptual drawing.

  • New Subway: North Side

    The North Side station is our deepest underground station, and the only fully underground station outside downtown. It’s at the north end of the pair of tunnels that carry the subway under the Allegheny.

    Compared to the older underground stations—Wood Street, Steel Plaza, and the old Gateway Center—this one is built on a grand scale, more reminiscent of the Metro in Washington than the rest of the subway in Pittsburgh. The decor is minimal, emphasizing the openness of the space.

  • Allegheny Station

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    The new subway line (which in this section, obviously, will be an elevated line) to the North Side is taking shape. This will be the Allegheny station when it’s finished. The line is scheduled to open in about a year.

     

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

  • Carved Wood, Allegheny West

    Carved ornaments at the base of a porch column in Allegheny West. After spending the better part of their lives slightly ashamed of their decorative elements, the Victorian houses in Allegheny West once again show them off with bright contrasting paint schemes.

  • Liverpool Street with an Argus C3

    The mighty Argus C3 is the most legendary of all 35-mm rangefinders. Its standard lens was indifferent, it was heavy as all get out, it was needlessly complex—but it sold for three decades and made 35-mm film the standard in still photography.

    Here are some pictures of the Victorian rowhouses in Manchester taken with one of old Pa Pitt’s C3s and the standard 50-mm Cintar lens.

    And here is the beast itself, affectionately known as the “Brick,” for reasons that probably don’t need much explaining. It also weighs about as much as a brick of comparable size. This camera has starred in more movies than Cary Grant, always playing the “professional” camera. It was the magazine photographer’s camera in The Philadelphia Story; it was the magical reporter’s camera in the Harry Potter series.

    Now let us enumerate the many virtues of the C3. First, it looks really technical, which was a big selling point. It was much cheaper than the better European cameras of the same era, but it had all those gears and dials on the front, which made it look quite expensive and impressive. Its mechanism is simple and well-designed: if you pick up a C3 that hasn’t been used in forty years, there’s a better than even chance that it still works. The lens is interchangeable (by a process that would try the patience of Job, if Job had been a photographer), and fairly good German wide-angle and telephoto lenses were offered. It’s built like a tank; if you drop it, you’ll probably just pick it up, shrug, and go on shooting.

    To take a picture, you first set the shutter speed on the shutter-speed dial, then the aperture on the lens. Then you look through the rangefinder window and find the distance, which—amazingly—also focuses the lens by means of the coupling gear on the front. (An astounding piece of automation!) Then you move your eye to the viewfinder and compose the picture. Then you cock the shutter with the lever on the front. Then you push the shutter button and take the picture. Then you push the film release to the side and wind the film to the next frame. All this does not quite happen in the blink of an eye, but you can get pretty good at it after some practice.

  • Liverpool Street, Manchester

    This extraordinary row of identical Second Empire houses is one of Pittsburgh’s architectural prizes, and the neighborhood itself is an interesting case study in preservation. Although it lost its business district to a horribly misconceived urban-renewal project that replaced urban shops with suburban ranch houses, Manchester has kept most of its opulent Victorian rowhouses, many of which were restored with money provided by billionaire news magnate Richard Mellon Scaife. The restoration was accomplished without displacing the lower-income residents of the neighborhood, so Manchester is one of the few historic districts in the country that have been restored without being yuppified.

    The picture was taken with a Kiev-4A camera.

  • Union Dale Cemetery

    The Union Dale Cemetery was to the city of Allegheny what the Allegheny Cemetery was to the city of Pittsburgh: the place where the rich and prominent went to their final rest, taking as much of their wealth with them as possible. It occupies an even more precipitous hillside from which, through the trees, we can catch occasional glimpses of the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh. These pictures were taken with a Kiev-4A camera.

  • The Other Warhols

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    Andy Warhol, whose life and art are memorialized in the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist, was often accused of dealing in junk. Oddly enough, other branches of his family (who have kept the original Slovak spelling of their name) are in a similar business.