Father Pitt

Category: South Side

  • Station Square from Across the River

    A large panorama (click on it to see it at full size) of Station Square in the winter as seen from across the Monongahela. The bluff of Mount Washington lowers behind, with the Monongahela Incline at the left of the picture.

  • Purple Dead-Nettle in Late Winter

    Purple Dead-Nettle (Lamium purpureum) growing from the stone wall under a railroad overpass at the back of the South Side Flats. In this sheltered position, it was already blooming in early March.

  • Tunnel Park on a Misty Evening

    Tunnel Park in the SouthSide Works isn’t very picturesque, especially in the winter; and yet anything can be picturesque with a layer of mist added.

  • Statues on St. Adalbert’s Church

    Some of the statues that adorn the 15th Street front of St. Adalbert’s, beginning, of course, with St. Adalbert himself. The church and its art are in need of restoration, which is to say in need of money.

    It was very kind of the sculptor to give these figures a book to read while they stood there for all eternity.

  • Hollywood-on-the-Mon

    Location shooting can happen anywhere. Wherever you see a sign with three initials and an arrow, you can follow it to a movie shooting on location. (You can identify the location by the fleets of Haddad’s trucks parked nearby.) Sometimes, however, the signs are more specific, especially when parking is involved.

  • Duquesne Brewery

    In the late 1970s, artists began to take over the vacant Duquesne Brewery. Now (after many battles over ownership) it has been renovated as artists’ lofts and studios.

  • Carved Stoop on the South Side

    Doors and doorframes often have elaborate carvings on the South Side, but not many stoops have elaborate decorations like these, either carved or stamped into the concrete.

  • Tunnel Park

    Tunnel Park is a strip of green on the river side of the SouthSide Works development. The name comes from the fact that there is a railroad tunnel beneath the green. And here is the entrance to the tunnel, which is not very picturesque but is something of a curiosity.

  • Morse School

    Now part of the Morse Gardens apartments, this fine-looking 1874 school was designed by T. D. Evans, about whom old Pa Pitt knows nothing else. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

  • Terra-Cotta Head

    This terra-cotta head of a helmeted allegorical figure (the flowing hair suggests femininity, but the armor suggests “don’t mess with me”) is really a first-rate piece of work, which makes it all the more surprising to find it built into the gable of a rowhouse on the South Side. It is the sort of ornament you add to tell your neighbors, “I am slightly more prosperous than you, because I can afford to have this built into my gable.”

    —Old Pa Pitt suspects that this is meant to be a head of Minerva, a Roman goddess you don’t mess with.

    The other decorative details on this house are also fine, though more in a vernacular Victorian Romanesque style. This ornament is in the arch above the middle second-floor window.