The Mary Schenley Memorial Fountain in Oakland, with the Cathedral of Learning in the background. Both have recently been restored. Somewhere underneath that fountain lies a buried bridge, left there when a hollow was filled in to make Schenley Plaza.
Everything old Pa Pitt remembers about Col. Alexander Leroy Hawkins is inscribed on the Spanish-American War Monument in Schenley Park. No one seems to think of him today, but he was obviously all the rage in 1899, when he died at sea. He was a hero of the Spanish-American War; he died during the the subsequent Philippine Insurrection, when the ungrateful natives, entirely disregarding the proven fact that the United States was a much nicer colonial power than Spain, attempted to set up their own republican government on their own terms, forcing the Americans to crush all resistance in order to guarantee them a republican form of government.
Mark Twain was one of the most vocal opponents of “American imperialism,” and he used the now-familiar term “quagmire” to describe our involvement in the Philippines:
I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.
Robert Burns stands guard in front of the Victoria Room at Phipps Conservatory. Schenley Park is full of unexpected statues around every corner.
Tucked behind Phipps Conservatory, this grand little building houses an auditorium, some classrooms, and a huge portrait of Henry Phipps given by his friend Andrew Carnegie.
The delightful fountain in front is a recent installation, but looks like it belongs with the building.
Oakland, Pittsburgh’s intellectual heart, is the third-largest central business district in Pennsylvania, after center-city Philadelphia and downtown Pittsburgh. Here we see the compact skyline of the medical and university district from the Panther Hollow Bridge.
It must be spring, because Phipps Conservatory is full of daffodils, tulips, grape hyacinths, and tourists.
Hye Jin Lee, a student at Carnegie Mellon, has woven colorful patterns into the fence along the Junction Hollow Bridge in Oakland.
Steam from the Carnegie heating plant in Junction Hollow below veils Hamerschlag Hall and Roberts Hall at Carnegie-Mellon.
In honor of the physicians who served in the First World War, Hygeia, goddess of health and proper sanitation, raises her torch in Schenley Park. Phipps Conservatory is in the background.
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.)
