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.
-
Webster Hall
-
Monolithic and Megalithic
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
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.
-
A Hinge
One of the hinges on the great wooden doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland.
-
The Westinghouse Memorial
Father Pitt thinks the Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park is the most effective memorial in Pittsburgh. Instead of a heroic statue of the great inventor George Westinghouse, what we see is a boy, representing the youth of the future, learning about Westinghouse’s accomplishments. Because of Westinghouse, we have safe high-speed travel and electricity in our homes, and many other astonishing things we take for granted today. Thousands of Westinghouse employees, who remembered the founder fondly, donated their own money to keep his memory alive. These pictures, which show only a small part of the memorial, were taken with a Kodak Tourist camera, a simple and very common folding camera that, like many other Kodak cameras of the time, has good optics and a reliable mechanism.
-
Two More of St. Paul’s with a Toy Camera
The same drug-store digital camera, the same day, two more pictures. The view of the spire half-obscured by leaves suggests a poetic fantasy of a forgotten and immemorially ancient church. Or perhaps it suggests that a tree was in the way.
-
St. Paul’s with a Toy Camera
It was one of those cheap digital cameras dangling from a hook in the drug store, but it takes pictures that, if you squint a bit, sort of remind you of the object the camera was pointed at. Here’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland as reflected in the glass of the Software Engineering Institute across the street:
And here are two more pictures of what would, liturgically speaking, be the west front of the cathedral, although geographically speaking it happens to be the south front:
One would prefer to use 120 film, or failing that 35-mm film, or failing that at least a better digital camera, but there are certain advantages to a camera nearly small enough to slip into a wallet. And the hazy glow from the cheap lens might be good for certain effects.
-
The Cathedral of Learning, Cleaned
A view of the Cathedral of Learning from Presbyterian Hospital. All the old dirt has been cleaned off, and the grand old lady looks new again. It’s impressive from any angle, but especially so from the west, where the carefully orchestrated symphony of setbacks dominates but does not intimidate the whole university district.