The curious urban clutter of Allegheny Center, a grand plan to build a completely new urban center for the North Side that, like most such plans from the 1960s, had at best only partial success. It destroyed almost the entire core of the old city of Allegheny, replacing it with modernist blocks and apartment warehouses. The clock tower at middle left marks the old Allegheny branch of the Carnegie Library, which stands at the end of a row of buildings preserved amidst the destruction. In the foreground, some of the millionaires’ mansions of Allegheny West.
The Manchester Bridge connected the Point with the North Side until 1969. When it was taken down, it left one looming black stone pier on the North Shore. After it had loomed for decades, architect Lou Astorino came up with the idea of transforming it into a memorial for Fred Rogers, with a colossal statue by Robert Berks framed by an oval cutout. Here we see the pier from across the river in Point Park.
Two abstract views of the newer Alcoa Building on the North Shore at the end of the Seventh Street Bridge. The one above was taken with a Lubitel TLR; the one below was taken with an Imperial plastic “toy” TLR.
Obviously old Pa Pitt is still rummaging through his large library of old pictures.
More of St. Boniface on East Street. These pictures were taken with a Samsung Digimax V4, which was quite a camera in its day. Though it fits (lumpily) in a pocket, it has a Schneider-Kreuznach Varioplan lens and allows manual control of everything. It is also the slowest camera old Pa Pitt has ever used, and he includes folding roll-film cameras in that calculation. It is especially slow if you set it to save in uncompressed TIFF format; then the time between shots is about 45 seconds, during which one could probably expose a whole roll of 620 film in a 6×9 roll-film camera.
But Father Pitt has decided to make this limitation part of the artistic experience: he knows he will be taking one shot, and thus has a strong motivation to compose it carefully. He has also set the camera to black-and-white only, making it his dedicated monochrome camera. In effect he has turned it into a Leica Monochrom, but one with a 4-megapixel sensor instead of a 40-megapixel sensor. It is in fact nowhere near a Leica Monochrom, but it does take pretty good pictures. And Father Pitt paid about $8 for it instead of $8,000, so he believes his money was well spent.
An isolated survivor of the once-populous East Street Valley, this splendid church (designed by A. F. Link and completed in 1926) was spared by a slight rerouting of the Parkway North. Since the latest reorganization in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, this is now part of Christ Our Savior parish.
The picture above is fairly large if you click on it; it’s a composite of eight separate photographs.
From old Pa Pitt’s archives, a picture of Three Rivers Stadium as it appeared in 2001. It was probably taken with a Russian twin-lens-reflex camera called a Lubitel, which was cheap but capable.
The auditorium of Allegheny High School on the North Side was built in 1936, at the height of the Art Deco era. There are three exits, and the architect’s scheme demanded a relief over each one. So we have Art Deco interpretations of the three masks of the classical theater: Comedy. Tragedy, and Meh.
