Father Pitt

Category: Oakland

  • Presbyterian Hospital

    Presbyterian Hospital was built in 1938 as a splendid Art Deco skyscraper with wings. The original design is impossible to appreciate from nearby, since other buildings have grown up to obscure it. But if we take a long view of it from Schenley Park, we can get some idea of how the architect intended it to be seen.

    The central tower is topped by yet another imitation of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, joining Allegheny General and the Gulf Tower in the style old Pa Pitt likes to call Mausoleum-on-a-Stick.

    Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

  • Colonnade of the Mellon Institute

    The columns of the Mellon Institute building in Oakland are the largest monolithic columns in the world, each made from one gigantic cylinder of stone. This picture was taken on film a few years ago, but nothing much has changed.

  • Twentieth Century Club, Oakland

    The Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh once was filled with elite clubs. Many of the buildings have been absorbed by the ever-expanding University of Pittsburgh, but the Twentieth Century Club—a name that sounded dashing and futuristic when the club was founded in 1894—remains, still a private women’s club. The building is larger than it looks, and the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh has been staging its summer season here for the past few years.

    Every so often, Father Pitt rifles through his archives and finds perfectly good pictures that, for one reason or another, he never got around to publishing. This one was taken in October of 2013.

    Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

  • Free to the People

    The entrance to the main Carnegie Library in Oakland. This is a picture Father Pitt took a few years ago, but nothing important has changed. The building was designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects; they, or Alden & Harlow without Longfellow, also designed many of the neighborhood branch libraries.

  • Concordia Club

    The Concordia Club was one of a number of fine clubs in Oakland; it lasted until 2009, when its building was sold to the University of Pittsburgh, which made it into the O’Hara Student Center. It was founded “to promote social and literary entertainment among its members,” and it seems always to have been a largely Jewish organization. Father Pitt does not know the details of the sale, but it took at least the club’s Web site by surprise. The site is frozen in 2009, with a calendar of events whose last entry is April 30, 2009: Annual Meeting and Dinner.

    The building itself was designed by the prolific Charles Bickel, who could always be relied on to make the client proud.

  • Police Patrol Station No. 4, Oakland

    Not that long ago, this interesting Romanesque building was the King’s Court movie theater; but, as the inscription shows, it was built as a police station. From cops to movies to noodles must have been a very interesting journey. The style is Romanesque, but with the overlapping round arches that some architectural historians regard as the origin of Gothic pointed arches.

  • Litchfield Towers, Oakland

    “Distinctive” is a good neutral term for these skyscraper dormitories that loom over the Oakland business district. The architect was Dahlen Ritchey, who designed three cylinders of unequal heights that he designated A, B, and C. Students quickly named them Ajax, Bab-O, and Comet.

  • Strand Theatre Building, Oakland

    [Update: We have more on the history of this building, which was the Natatorium Building before it became a theater.]

    This once-splendid movie house on Forbes Avenue was designed by Harry S. Bair, a specialist in neighborhood movie palaces who also designed the Regent in East Liberty. According to comments on Cinematreasures.org, it was built with the screen at the street end: you had to walk up a long hall to come in at the rear of the theater. Thus it took advantage of the hillside location to make a naturally sloped auditorium. The building ceased to be a theater about four decades ago; it is now retail stores and apartments.

    The picture above is a composite of four photographs.

  • Oakland

    A panoramic view of the Oakland medical-intellectual complex, as seen from Schenley Park just after sunset.

  • The Cathedral of Learning and the Carnegie

    Cathedral of Learning and Carnegie, Oakland, Pittsburgh, 2015-03-30 bw

    As seen from the lawn in front of Phipps Conservatory.

    Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3 (with a virtual red filter).