Category: North Side

  • 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.

  • Last Remnants of a Slovak Neighborhood

    2009-09-13-Slovak-Church-01

    Once there was a lively little Slovak neighborhood at the north end of the 16th Street Bridge. Today almost nothing remains of it except one crumbling abandoned church (most recently used as a daycare center); the rectory, now divided into apartments; and one substantial building between them, hideously deformed by an addition that must have been designed to express the builder’s seething hatred of beauty and proportion.

    2009-09-13-Slovak-Church-02

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    2009-09-13-Slovak-Neighborhood

  • Heinz Field from the Point

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    As seen across the river, Heinz Field, where the Steelers and the Panthers play, is pleasingly symmetrical. The side facing the river is left open to give the television cameras an occasional view of the skyline.

  • Postpostmodern

    The Alcoa headquarters on the North Shore, which one might describe as a modernist-revival building.

  • Vintage Doorway, Vintage Camera

    A beautifully proportioned entrance on North Avenue in the Mexican War Streets. If the picture looks like something from the 1930s, it isn’t. But the camera is. It’s an old Agfa Isolette, using Croatian film whose formula hasn’t changed since this camera was new.

  • Back End of the Mexican War Streets

    The Mexican War Streets are mostly flat, but at the back end they start to creep up the hill toward Perry Hilltop. This beautiful block of rowhouses is just about perfect: the street paved with Belgian block, the houses well taken care of but not ostentatiously overrestored, and filled with friendly neighbors.

    Brick sidewalks have their own charm, and they become more charming as they age and grow more difficult to walk on.

  • Spring in West Park

    The trees in the old arboretum are leafing out, the cherries and the violets are blooming, and the ducks in Lake Elizabeth are fat and happy.