Photographed on Elite Chrome 100 film with a Kodak Retinette.
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PittsburghCemeteries.com and FloraPittsburghensis.com
Since these two sites see nearly as many visits as Father Pitt’s main site here, they deserve their own domain names. They have therefore moved to a snappy new server and been given a complete redesign—with, of course, a black-and-gold site logo for each to make sure you know where you are. The old addresses will continue to work indefinitely, but new content will appear at these new domains:
https://pittsburghcemeteries.com/
https://florapittsburghensis.com/
The new server will allow us to offer some features not available before—notably an alphabetical index for each site.
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The Civic Arena
It was already called the “Mellon Arena” by this time, which old Pa Pitt always thought was a perfect parable of what was happening to American public life at the end of the twentieth century: what was built by the people, and named for the people, was handed over to a big corporation. Most Pittsburghers don’t remember that this was actually built as the Civic Auditorium, a new home for the Civic Light Opera. Sports were secondary in the original plans.
The Civic Arena was never beautiful in Father Pitt’s eyes, but it was impressive. The huge retractable dome—the world’s first—looked like an alien spacecraft that had landed on the Lower Hill, demolishing all the houses and business and so forth, as alien spacecraft tend to do when they land, because apparently space aliens are jerks.
Huge retractable domes turn out to be a nightmare to maintain, and the dome stopped retracting several years before the Arena was abandoned.
Father Pitt will now take a moment to praise the little camera that took these pictures in May of 2000. It was a Smena 8M from the legendary Soviet Lomo camera works, a cheap plastic box with a very good lens. There was nothing automatic about it; it had manual adjustments for shutter speed, aperture, and focus, and countless great Russian photographers learned the basics on cheap but capable cameras like these. Father Pitt was not a great fan of the Soviet Union, but he has always had a soft spot for Soviet cameras.
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Three Rivers Arts Festival
This year the Arts Festival has taken over Penn Avenue and cross streets in the Cultural District.
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Russell H. Boggs House, 1999
This was the home of one of the founders of the famous Boggs & Buhl department store, which lasted until 1958. A few years after Father Pitt took this picture, this grand house was grandly restored and opened as “The Inn on the Mexican War Streets.” Before the restoration, it had been the parsonage of Trinity Lutheran Church next door, creating a curious spectacle of a parsonage considerably grander than its squat little modern church. But the house needed more maintenance than the church could afford: in fact the new owners spent more than a million dollars fixing the place up.
If you look at this picture, you may have a vague impression that something is missing from this house; but unless you are in the architecture business it might take you ages to guess what it is. There are no gutters and no downspouts. It seems that Mr. Boggs had a thing about gutters. Instead, there is a remarkable internal drainage system that, when it works, carries runoff through the walls, and, when it is broken, pours runoff in a burbling cascade down the grand staircase. That is one of the reasons it took a million dollars to restore this house.
Addendum: The architects were Longfellow, Alden & Harlow; the house was built in 1888.
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Altar and Reredos in Heinz Chapel
The elaborately carved reredos does its part to focus attention on the altar before it. The four wooden figures are Peter and John on the left, Paul and James the Greater on the right. The carving was done by the Irving & Casson—A. H. Davenport Co. of Boston
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Washington Plaza Apartments
This is our only major building by the modernist icon I. M. Pei, and it was one of his earlier works. Though this picture was taken in May of 2000 (with an Argus A camera), the building had not changed much since it was put up in 1964. Since 2000 it has acquired a new name, City View Apartments, and a coat of brownish-grey paint (we have a more recent picture of the building here).
St. Francis Central Hospital, at the right of the picture, has been replaced by a hotel.
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Spanish Mission Style in Schenley Farms
Schenley Farms, the little enclave of quiet residential streets amid the bustle of the Oakland intellectual district, is an encyclopedia of housing styles from the early twentieth century. Here we have a very simple façade with elements of the Spanish Mission style: stucco (of course), an arcaded porch, tile roof, a little iron-railed balcony, and a design that turns inward, with more wall than window in front.
