Father Pitt

Category: North Side

  • St. Boniface in Black and White

    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.

    Map

  • Carnegie Science Center

    And its pet submarine, the USS Requin.

  • Capitals, St. Boniface Church

    Three different carved capitals at the entrance to St. Boniface Church on East Street.

  • St. Boniface Church

    St. Boniface Church

    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.


    Map

  • Three Rivers Stadium

    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.

  • Art Deco Masks

    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.


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  • Allegheny County Civil War Memorial, West Park

    Seen across Lake Elizabeth. This monument was “Erected to the memory of the 4,000 brave men of Allegheny County who fell in the great struggle to preserve the integrity of our Union.” Even today, four thousand men would be a huge number from this one county, and Allegheny County did not have more than a million people in it back in the 1860s.

    Near the memorial was a bridge over the railroad, now gone, with the approaches blocked by chain-link fence. Some enterprising romantic discovered that the fence makes a fine billboard for a message spelled out in padlocks.

  • Katsafanas Coffee Sign

    The Katsafanas Coffee Co. has been gone for many years, but this sign still looks fresh on its old building on North Avenue.

  • Allegheny City Stables

    The Allegheny City Stables were built in 1896. If you enlarge the photo (click on it), you can just make out the old sign over the main door:

    D.P.W. 8th DIV.
    BUREAU OF HIGHWAYS & SEWERS

    It’s right across North Avenue from Allegheny West, then the richest neighborhood in Allegheny. Perhaps this was one of the encroachments that induced Allegheny West society to move in a body to Sewickley Heights, where their descendants still live today.

    Now, 123 years later, Allegheny West is once again the finest neighborhood on the North Side, and its desirability is spilling across North Avenue. The stable is being renovated and turned into loft apartments, like every other old industrial building.

    (And if you notice a familiar picture at the Wikipedia article, it’s because Father Pitt added it himself to show the current state of the building.)

  • Engine Company No. 3

    This fine old firehouse on Arch Street, a city-designated historic structure, is exactly what you think of when you think of a firehouse. It’s been empty for some time, but its Central Northside neighborhood is growing more and more fashionable among restoration fanatics, and scaffolding inside suggests that the old firehouse will not be empty much longer.


    Map The firehouse is on the southeast corner of Arch Street and Jacksonia Street. Behind it is the aptly named Fireman Way.