Father Pitt

Category: Oakland

  • The Entrance to Phipps Conservatory

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    For about a century, Phipps Conservatory, the gift of Andrew Carnegie’s friend Henry Phipps, belonged to the Ciry of Pittsburgh. After it was turned over to a private nonprofit group, Phipps started to grow and flourish like a tropical vine. This new entrance, opened a few years ago, is a perfect match for the splendid Victorian glasshouses behind it. Yet it is also unmistakably contemporary. This is a textbook example of architecture that is sympathetic to its surroundings without being slavishly imitative. (Not, old Pa Pitt hastens to add, that there is anything wrong with slavish imitation once in a while.)

  • Hebe Among the Orchids

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    Hebe, Greek goddess of youth, cupbearer of Olympus, stands among the Phalaenopsis orchids in the Sunken Garden at Phipps Conservatory.

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  • A Map of Oakland

    Father Pitt mentions Oakland more often than any other neighborhood, probably because Oakland, as the intellectual and cultural center of Pittsburgh, is more fun to look at than any other neighborhood. Here is a helpful map (click to download in PDF format) that shows most of the Oakland sights mentioned by Father Pitt so far. Print it on an ordinary letter-size sheet of paper, carry it with you, and take some better pictures than the ones old Pa Pitt has to offer.

    oakland

  • Shakespeare at Work

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    William Shakespeare hard at work on something brilliant. One of the larger-than-life Noble Quartet in front of the Carnegie in Oakland, Shakespeare represents Literature (along with Michelangelo for Art, Bach for Music, and Newton for Science). The picture was taken with a cheap toy digital camera, then turned to grayscale because the cheap digital colors were just awful.

  • Complementary Masses

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    An abstract sculpture in front of the Carnegie Museum of Art perfectly complements the mass of the Cathedral of Learning in the background. This photograph was taken a few years ago, when the Cathedral of Learning still proudly bore its coat of soot from the age of heavy industry.

  • Webster Hall

    Webster Hall in Oakland, designed by Pittsburgh’s favorite architect Henry Hornbostel, was a grand hotel in its day. Now it’s turned into apartments, but church ladies all over Pittsburgh still treasure the recipe for Webster Hall Cake.

  • Monolithic and Megalithic

    Mellon Institute

    The columns of the Mellon Institute are supposedly the largest monolithic columns in the world. For scale, note, if you can make him out, the man with the backpack walking down the steps.

     

  • Free to the People

    Late-afternoon sun glows on the main entrance to the Carnegie Library in Oakland. Andrew Carnegie, who thought it was a scandal to die rich, attributed his own success to the access he had as a child to a kindly gentleman’s library. There are still Carnegie Libraries in towns and cities all over the United States, but this is the greatest of them all.

  • Heinz Chapel, Inside and Out

    Somehow Charles Z. Klauder managed to create perfectly Gothic buildings with an Art Deco sensibility in every detail. His Cathedral of Learning is the most perfect Gothic skyscraper in the world; it’s organically Gothic, not just a skyscraper with Gothic trimmings.

    On the same ideally landscaped square in Oakland sits Heinz Chapel, Klauder’s last work, a building with more modest dimensions but more flamboyant ornament. Its lacy spire is a remarkable work of Gothic fantasy. Its transept windows, designed (like all the other stained glass in the building) by Charles J. Connick, are supposedly the tallest stained-glass windows in the world, or among the tallest, or rather tallish, depending on which source you consult. It’s one of Pittsburgh’s favorite wedding sites, and on a Saturday afternoon weddings follow one after another as though the brides were on a conveyor belt.

    The cornerstone identifies the date in figures that perfectly match the Deco Gothic spirit of the building.

    These photographs were taken with a Zorki-4 bearing a Jupiter-8 f/2 lens, which is a fine camera for a day out in the city. It’s versatile, it’s built like a Soviet tank, and the lens is sharp and fast (and interchangeable with any screwmount Leica lens). And there were literally millions made, so if it does break you can just get another one.

  • Modern Oakland by Night

    Software Engineering Institute

    A night view of the Software Engineering Institute in Oakland. Look closely for the interesting reflections of St. Paul’s in the windows.

    Beginning photographers are often advised to buy the most expensive tripod they can afford. The opposite might be better advice. If you wait until you can afford an expensive tripod, you may never buy the tripod. A twenty-dollar tripod may be a bit flimsy and unreliable, but it makes pictures possible that were not possible before. No amount of money spent on a better tripod will increase a photographer’s capabilities as much as that first twenty dollars. This picture was taken with a forty-dollar Russian Lubitel twin-lens reflex camera supported by a twenty-dollar tripod.