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Plant Your Scallions
You buy a bundle of scallions, or green onions, or whatever they call them at your grocery, and you use half of them. What do you do with the other half? You can root them in water, or just stick them in the ground, and they will grow fat stalks with beautiful flowers that last for days in a vase.
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Twentieth Century Club, Oakland
As you can see, it takes some effort to achieve this kind of symmetry in Pittsburgh, a city where the phrase “ground floor” is ambiguous at best. Pittsburgh’s premier women’s club hired Pittsburgh’s premier architect of clubs, Benno Janssen, to design this splendid Renaissance palace, built—according to the inscription—in 1930. The inscription also tells us that the club was founded in 1894. The rest (on the right) is the club motto: “Not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world.” The building now belongs to Pitt.
Janssen liked this kind of cartouche with monogram: compare his Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association.
The entrance on the Bigelow Boulevard side, at lower ground level.
A relief over the Bigelow Boulevard entrance bears the club motto again. For context, here is an older picture from the corner of Bigelow Boulevard and Bigelow Boulevard (no one said navigating Oakland was easy); the lower entrance is behind the elegant stone wall.
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Decorations on the Central Turnverein
Now the Gardner Steel Conference Center, the Central Turnverein was German Pittsburgh’s most elegant athletic club. The building is an extraordinary early-modern design by Kiehnel and Elliott, and they trimmed it with geometric decorations inspired by the latest Jugendstil architecture overseas.
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Cy Hungerford on the Sacco-Vanzetti Case
Cy Hungerford was a Pittsburgh legend. He drew editorial cartoons for more than seventy years, fifty of those years for the Post-Gazette. In this cartoon from August 11, 1927, he depicts poor Uncle Sam walking a tightrope labeled “The Sacco-Vanzetti Case” over Niagara Falls. Old Pa Pitt took this cartoon from a microfilm archive and cleaned it up quite a bit, so that it looks more like Hungerford’s original drawing and less like a scratched and grubby microfilm. It is out of copyright in the United States, so anyone can use it. In countries where copyright depends on the life of the author, be aware that Hungerford lived till 1983. It is very unlikely that his estate will worry about someone using his cartoons in Luxembourg or Malaysia, but old Pa Pitt, who is based in the United States, is not responsible for foreign copyright laws.
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Grand Concourse, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Terminal
The interior of the P&LE terminal, now Pittsburgh’s most spectacular restaurant.
Addendum: According to the Inland Architect, the “quite elaborate” waiting room and stair hall were designed by Crossman & Sturdy, decorators, of Chicago. The architect of the building was William G. Burns, or possibly George W. Burns, depending on the source.
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