Heinz Field seen from Mount Washington on a sunny morning.
This picture is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use it for any purpose whatsoever.
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Heinz Field
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Heinz Field and the Allegheny
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Allegheny General Hospital
The only really elegant skyscraper on the North Side is this hospital, designed by York & Sawyer in 1926. The style is what old Pa Pitt likes to call “Mausoleum-on-a-Stick”: the central tower is topped by an Art Deco interpretation of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. This is one of three Mausoleum-on-a-Stick towers in Pittsburgh, and two of them are hospitals (the other being Presbyterian Hospital in Oakland). The third is the Gulf Building,which was designed by the originators of the style.
Below, we see the hospital with the narrow streets of Dutchtown in front of it.
York & Sawyer built two skyscrapers in 1926 with notably similar designs. The other is the Royal Bank Tower in Montreal, which was the tallest building in the British Empire at the time (though it did not compare with the tall buildings of New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh). The picture at left, by “Thomas1313,” was made available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
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Autumn in the Union Dale Cemetery
Cemeteries in Pittsburgh have the advantage of Pittsburgh topography to make them picturesque. Add fall colors, and the picturesqueness is irresistible. The Union Dale Cemetery is the premier address for deceased residents of the old City of Allegheny.
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Alcoa Building, North Shore
The new Alcoa Building, like the old, is a tribute to aluminum. Here we see the end of it that faces Sandusky Street, at the foot of the Andy Warhol Bridge.
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Bald Eagles at the National Aviary
These two female eagles were injured in the wild and can no longer fly. They must think they died and went to eagle heaven, where food comes to them rather than having to be hunted down with infinite labor. This is a quick cell-phone snapshot, and old Pa Pitt apologizes for the quality.
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Burrowing Owl at the National Aviary
She may be only about the size of a common pigeon, but she thinks you’d better not mess with her. This is a cell-phone snapshot, which accounts for the poor quality of the image. But it’s an impressive little bird.
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Sidewalks of Allegheny West
It may be that old Pa Pitt will offend every resident of every other street in Pittsburgh by saying so, but he believes that Beech Avenue in Allegheny West is the most beautiful residential street in the city.
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Primitive Science, Modern Science
These bronze reliefs by Sidney Waugh stand over what was once the main entrance to the Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science (to give its full title). From loincloths to lab coats is less of a distance than you might think: Waugh took pains to illustrate the remarkable cleverness of the “primitive” American Indians who had long-distance communication (via smoke signals) and snowshoes, an invention Waugh chose specifically because it arose only in North America and nowhere else. As for Modern Science, we should not underestimate the difficulty of imparting dignity to a figure in a lab coat, a feat Waugh has carried off with aplomb. To a world used to the opposition of modern science against primitive superstition, Waugh presents the two figures as engaged in exactly the same enterprise.
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Col. James Anderson, Founder of Free Libraries
Who was the founder of free libraries in Western Pennsylvania? You might say Andrew Carnegie, but Mr. Carnegie himself will be the first to correct you. As a boy, he spent his Saturdays in the library of Colonel James Anderson, whose selfless example inspired Carnegie to become the greatest patron of libraries in the history of civilization. This monument, put up by Carnegie in 1904 near his Free Library in Allegheny, may look humble at first glance, but for the art Carnegie engaged possibly the greatest American sculptor of all time, Daniel Chester French. It still stands beside the Buhl Planetarium, just across the plaza from the old Carnegie Free Library in Allegheny Center.
The inscription is obviously more recent than the monument, but probably duplicates the wording of a lost plaque:
Allegheny Center is a short walk from the North Side subway station.
