Father Pitt

Category: North Side

  • Carnegie Free Library, North Side

    Update: Since this article was written in 2012, the library building has been taken over by the Children’s Museum. Its future now seems assured.

    Andrew Carnegie gave this library to the city of Allegheny, where it was built at the main intersection of the city in 1889. By some standards this was America’s first public library. Carnegie had given Braddock a library earlier (that library, in spite of the collapse of the town around it, still stands), and other philanthropists had given libraries to the public, like Enoch Pratt’s in Baltimore. But those were run as private charities with money from an endowment given by the philanthropist. Allegheny’s was built by Carnegie, but run by the city government.

    In the 1960s, the library and its neighboring music hall were among the very few buildings spared when the rest of central Allegheny was demolished to make way for an ambitious urban-fantasy project called Allegheny Center. The redevelopment was not very successful, and today the concrete plazas that replaced downtown Allegheny are unnaturally quiet in the middle of the day. After the building was damaged in a lightning strike a few years ago, the library itself moved to a new building a few blocks up Federal Street. The music hall is still active as a theater, and there are a few offices in the library building, but this grand entrance is no longer in use.

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

  • Carnegie Hall, North Side

    Allegheny’s own Carnegie Hall was built in 1890, right next to the library Carnegie gave to the city a year earlier. The library building still stands, though the library has moved a few blocks up Federal Street; the music hall is now used as the “New Hazlett Theater,” a venue for miscellaneous performances. The library and music hall were among the very few buildings spared when the heart of Allegheny was demolished in the 1960s for the “Allegheny Center” project, which was either an ambitious attempt at creating the modern ideal of a city or an audacious stab at the heart of Pittsburgh’s conquered rival, depending on how you look at it.

    Carnegie Hall is a short walk from the North Side subway station.

    Addendum: The architects were Smithmeyer & Pelz.

  • Birds at the National Aviary

    UPDATE: Thanks to a kind correspondent from the National Aviary (see the comments below), we have corrected some misinformation about the penguins you see in these pictures.

    The National Aviary is one of Pittsburgh’s most unexpected treasures. This is the largest collection of birds in America, and it exists only because of a series of curious historical accidents.

    Henry Phipps gave the city of Allegheny a conservatory (he would later give the much more famous one in Schenley Park to Pittsburgh). In 1952, the city of Pittsburgh added birds and made it into a “conservatory and aviary.”

    In 1991, Mayor Masloff, faced with a funding crisis, decided to close the aviary and transfer the birds to the zoo. Old Pa Pitt himself called the mayor’s office to protest: he made a very pretty little speech about how the aviary was not just a local amusement but a unique national treasure, ending by saying that he wanted one voice to be recorded in favor of keeping the aviary.

    “One voice?” squeaked the beleaguered secretary who had answered his call.

    It turned out that most of Pittsburgh had called the mayor’s office that day; and, like a good public servant, Mayor Masloff listened to us. She found a way to turn the aviary over to a private foundation. Not long after, the United States Congress designated it the National Aviary, and since then it has doubled in size.

    Father Pitt could blither on about how important the National Aviary is, how it houses some species that are entirely extinct in the wild, how it sponsors vital conservation programs, and so on. But what he really wants to do is show you pictures of birds.

    The African Rockhopper Penguins have their own section called Penguin Point, where you can see them under the water as well as on the rocks. The fuzzy, unkempt-looking penguin is going through what a correspondent from the National Aviary calls a “catastrophic molt,” in which it gains a lot of weight, sheds all its feathers, and looks just awful for a while.

    Aptly named Scarlet-Headed Blackbirds perch in the Grasslands free-flight room. There are three big free-flight rooms in which the birds are at liberty to fly around the human visitors.

    Black Kites dive for tasty bits of chicken in the Skydeck show on the roof. Here birds of prey are allowed to fly free, though they have tiny radio-telemetry units to track them just in case they should decide to fly a bit too far. No bird has ever been lost from this show, however, because the birds, being no fools, always come back to where the food is.

    The National Aviary is a short walk from the North Side subway station.

  • The Heavens and the Earth

    These stunning Art Deco reliefs by Sidney Waugh decorate the old Buhl Planetarium, now part of the Children’s Museum. The Carnegie Science Center , which replaced the Buhl Planetarium as our chief science museum (and has the old Zeiss projector from the Buhl Planetarium on display), is big and exciting, but it was not  built at a time when the meeting of science and art was as fruitful as it was in the Moderne era.

  • 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.