Father Pitt

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The Acropolis Plan for Pitt

Henry Hornbostel imagined filling the University of Pittsburgh’s hillside site with classical temples, making a new Pittsburgh Acropolis that would be the envy of the intellectual world. The plan was never completed, because classical architecture went out of fashion too soon, and because it was supplanted by the even madder plan of putting a university in a skyscraper. But several of the classical buildings that remain on Pitt’s campus were meant to be part of this Pittsburgh Acropolis.

The image comes from an advertisement for Ruud water heaters, the amazing improvement in hot-water supplies that didn’t require servants to tend to a boiler.

June 9, 2023
Canevin Hall, Duquesne University

A Tudor Gothic building that fits well with Old Main and the chapel across the street. The cornerstone was laid in 1922 by Archbishop Canevin himself (Pittsburgh was not an archdiocese, but Canevin was titular Archbishop of Pelusium).

Like many Pittsburgh buildings, Canevin Hall has more than one ground floor.

June 9, 2023
Kraynick’s Bike Shop, Garfield

Kraynick’s Bike Shop is a Pittsburgh legend, and it lives in a slightly bedraggled building that is so typically Pittsburgh it should never be improved. Now that Garfield is coming up in the trendy world, someone is likely to restore this Second Empire storefront sooner or later, but it retains so many layers of history, while still preserving so many original details (look at the roof slates, the brick cornice, the dentils on the third-floor dormers, the lintels above the second-floor windows), that it will be a shame when it is remade into a picture-book Victorian building.

June 8, 2023
Setting Sun

June 7, 2023
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.

June 6, 2023
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.

June 6, 2023
A Stroll Down Sarah Street on the South Side

June 5, 2023
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.

June 4, 2023
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.

June 3, 2023
Peonies

June 2, 2023