Seen here from up the street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Craig Street.
We have more pictures of Webster Hall, including some of the decorative details.
Comments
-
Webster Hall, Oakland
-
Systematized Collection in the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems
Many visitors to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History bolt right past the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems on their way to the dinosaurs, but it’s worth a stop. There are informative exhibits of various sorts, including a gallery of glow-in-the-dark minerals that will catch children’s attention. And then there’s the room full of properly categorized minerals. Wall mirrors make the systematic collection look practically infinite, but even without the mirrors it is an impressive collection. There is certainly no better place in Pittsburgh to learn to recognize various minerals, and examining them in three dimensions is much more educational than seeing pictures in a book.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.
Comments -
Marching Toward Enlightenment
The complete third-floor mural sequence in one large composite image. John White Alexander gave us one of the great mural sequences in America in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Institute. The Crowning of Labor, also known as The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, is the part of the sequence that gets the most attention. But it was all meant to lead upward to a climax on the third floor.
The Carnegie Museum of Art site has an informative page on the Grand Staircase and its murals, with of course an obligatory paragraph to tell you that because they are old they are evil. The figures on the third floor were meant to represent crowds of ordinary people marching toward enlightenment—to be represented in Carnegie’s Noble Quartet of Art, Science, Music, and Literature. But the artist died before he could paint Enlightenment, so that, like the rest of humanity, these people will never reach it.
Here are all the murals in the sequence individually.
When the murals were restored a few years ago, one square was left unrestored in this mural to show us how a century of Pittsburgh atmosphere had affected the paintings.
Comments -
Dismantling the Polar World
It was one of the oddest things in the Carnegie, and few people ever made it that far after an afternoon of gawking at dinosaurs: a whole gallery on the third floor, the Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life, dedicated to the “Polar World.” Now, after decades of informing visitors one or two at a time, the exhibit is finally being taken down. But it is being taken down slowly and carefully; and since the hall is also the only route in and out of the Alcoa Hall of American Indians—an exhibit even more invisible to most museum visitors, but one well worth your time—the few visitors who make it to the third floor have a chance to see what happens when a longstanding exhibit vanishes.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The space will be used for a greatly expanded Egyptian gallery, which will doubtless be more popular. But it will not be as odd. Every museum that can afford one has a good Egyptian gallery; few museums below the Arctic Circle had a gallery of Polar Life.
Comments -
St. Paul’s Cathedral, Oakland
These are far from the first pictures of this cathedral that old Pa Pitt has published, and they certainly will not be the last. A cathedral is too big a deal to take in all at once.
The west front (liturgically speaking1) is a towering Gothic fantasy whose scale is hard to convey in a photograph. Here the human figures on the steps give us some context.
The main doors turn on the mightiest hinges in Pittsburgh.
This would be a magnificent main front for any church; here it is just the façade of the south transept.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. The south-transept entrance.
We have many more pictures of St. Paul’s from many years of passing by with a camera.
- In describing church architecture, the altar is always considered “east,” which makes the entrance opposite the altar “west,” and so on, regardless of what your lying compass says. ↩︎
Comments -
The Chancery, Oakland
Edward J. Weber, who wrote the book on Catholic Church Buildings, was the architect of this little building, part of the cathedral complex and now known as the St. Paul Cathedral Center. This building and Synod Hall behind it were built in 1914.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. We have more pictures of the Chancery here.
Comments -
Fountain at Heinz Chapel
Once again, old Pa Pitt has set his shutter to the highest speed possible, just because no one else these days would take a picture of a fountain that way. If you would like a picture taken with a slow shutter speed that shows the fountain as an eruption of cotton candy, you can take your own picture.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
Comments -
More Details of Heinz Chapel, Oakland
More details of Heinz Chapel, including the arms of various American colleges and universities. We have another collection of details of Heinz Chapel here, or you can see our whole collection of Heinz Chapel pictures spanning nearly nineteen years.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
Comments -
Columns of the Mellon Institute, Oakland
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. A parade of the largest, though not the tallest, monolithic columns in the world.
Comments -
University Square, Oakland
This huge complex was built in two stages, one opening in 1955 and the other in 1957. It was designed by Arthur E. Tennyson, who was responsible for dozens of modernist apartment blocks in Pittsburgh and suburbs. Tennyson seems to have been a get-the-job-done kind of architect; his designs seldom strike old Pa Pitt as remarkable aesthetically, but he must have been a master at managing large projects and bringing them in on budget.
The complex was newsworthy as the first cooperative apartments built in Pittsburgh in a long time. The first stage included 126 apartments, with 88 more planned for the second stage, according to a Press article that appeared when the first stage opened.1
The swank Shadyside co-operative was dedicated formally this week. It is composed of two and three-bedroom apartments, all of which have a living room, a separate dining room and a foyer. Most have two baths and some have a balcony. Standard equipment in all kitchens is a dishwasher and garbage disposal unit. All have maximum closet space. A master television antenna guarantees each apartment owner five channels.
Special provisions for inside air conditioning allow each tenant to control his own weather. Beneath the eight-story building are two floors for inside parking.
The lobby, designed by Robert Janisse, features a fountain set in a bed of plants and flowers. Lobby and hallways are completely carpeted. Entrances, framed in cut stone, give access to exterior walks which traverse a spacious lawn, complete with shrubs and trees.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
Comments
