Father Pitt

Would you like to see a random article?
Of course you would.

Achille Giammartini

Purely by accident, old Pa Pitt stumbled on this portrait of the great architectural sculptor Achille Giammartini, whose work adorns churches, houses, and commercial buildings all over the city. There is almost no trace of Giammartini on the Web: in fact, search engines usually come up with no more than half a dozen results, and the first two are usually from Father Pitt. So this seems like as good a time as any to announce Father Pitt’s new project.

Bit by bit, Father Pitt is building a Pittsburgh Encyclopedia, where he will keep detailed information about architects, sculptors, neighborhoods, and such things, so that he can refer to those articles rather than repeating himself every time he publishes a new picture. Something similar has worked well with Flora Pittsburghensis and the Flora Pittsburghensis reference site.

At present the Pittsburgh Encyclopedia is just beginning: it has nine articles in total. But we have just added an article on Achille Giammartini that gathers more information about him than exists in any other single place on the Web.

June 21, 2023
Trolleys in Gateway Station

A two-car Blue Line train comes in from Wood Street and heads out under the Allegheny to North Side; a Silver Line car departs for Wood Street. You can see the video at full resolution on its Wikimedia Commons hosting page.

The video is obviously hand-held. There are some very sophisticated video-stabilizing algorithms in our video-editing software, but the parade of identical square windows in a moving trolley makes them panic and jiggle the picture all over the screen, so we give you the video without stabilization.

June 20, 2023
Resting Fawn

In Allegheny Cemetery. Cemetery deer don’t care about anything.

June 19, 2023
Father Pitt’s Great Big List of Buildings and Architects

For some time now, old Pa Pitt has been gathering information about buildings and their architects in a spreadsheet, so that he doesn’t have to go looking for the information every time he takes another picture. It is still in its early stages, but it already has more than 200 entries. Since it might be useful to other people as well, Father Pitt has decided to publish it:

Father Pitt’s Great Big List of Buildings and Architects

You should be able to download the spreadsheet in Open Document, Excel, or any of several other formats, and you can play around with the spreadsheet without changing the original.

June 19, 2023
The Back of Bellefield Presbyterian Church on a Rainy Day

Pedestrians and drivers often see the front of this magnificent Romanesque church, but few ever notice the back. It is plainer but still interesting in its masses, with the half-round auditorium characteristic of many Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the late 1800s.

The front (seen below in a picture from last year) is also given a round bulge, so that the whole building seems to orbit around that polygonal central tower.

Old Pa Pitt will repeat what he said the last time he published pictures of Bellefield Presbyterian Church:

The church was built in 1896 as the First United Presbyterian Church; the architect was William Boyd, who gave the congregation the most fashionably Richardsonian interpretation of Romanesque he could manage. It was more or less in competition with the original Bellefield Presbyterian, of which only the tower now remains. But in 1967 the two congregations merged. They kept this building, renamed it Bellefield Presbyterian, and abandoned the old Bellefield Presbyterian up the street, which was later demolished for an office block.

June 18, 2023
Penn Avenue Gatehouse, Allegheny Cemtery

If you are not a frequent visitor to Allegheny Cemetery, you might pass the Penn Avenue gatehouse and wonder whether your memory is playing tricks on you. Isn’t there something…different about it?

Your memory is not playing tricks on you. Here is a picture from 2021:

What old Pa Pitt was told was that engineers had determined that the tower was dangerously unstable. The stones were carefully taken apart and labeled, and maybe someday the tower will be restored.

June 17, 2023
Uxor Way and St. Michael’s Church, South Side

This is one of those only-in-Pittsburgh views: a glorious Romanesque church on the Slopes hovering over little frame alley houses on the Flats. St. Michael’s (now the Angel’s Arms apartments) was designed by Charles F. Bartberger, father of, and often confused with, the prolific Charles M. Bartberger.

June 17, 2023
UPMC Mercy Pavilion

The new UPMC Mercy Pavilion is supposed to be tons of fun for the entire neighborhood, according to the sponsored news stories distributed by UPMC. It includes a café and art installations and a gym and even a few medical facilities. According to the “Building Overview” page on the hospital’s site, “HOK—a global design, architecture, engineering, and planning firm—designed the pavilion with input from Chris Downey, AIA. Mr. Downey is one of the world’s few blind architects.” HOK, formerly Hellmuth Obata + Kassbaum, also designed One Oxford Centre and PNC Park (with local favorite Lou Astorino).

June 16, 2023
Seventh Street Bridge

June 15, 2023
Construction Site at Sunset

A new apartment block is going up at the SouthSide Works.

June 15, 2023