A perfectly Romanesque lion guards the entrance to the Allegheny County Courthouse. When H. H. Richardson designed the building, the lion was meant to be nearer street level; but shaving one storey’s worth of height off Grant Street left it high on the front wall.
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.
Hebe, Greek goddess of youth, cupbearer of Olympus, stands among the Phalaenopsis orchids in the Sunken Garden at Phipps Conservatory.
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.
Made entirely of glass, this art-deco mural, or sculpture, shows a “puddler,” a man who stirs the molten iron ore until it’s tasty enough to make good steel. The location should be obvious from the photograph, but note that the Puddler himself is around the corner over the Wood Street entrance.
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.
A lion in Mellon Park guards a formal green.
A wrought-iron fence and gate in Mellon Park, surrounded by the rich and subtle colors of early November.
Early November: the gaudy colors of the maples have fled, but the oaks and birches take over with richer and subtler tones. This fountain is a bit medieval, a bit magical, and a bit silly, which makes it just about perfect.
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.
