After the flamboyant Gothic of Holy Rosary, this stately Renaissance palace is quite a contrast.
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Top of the Arrott Building
The top of the Arrott Building, rendered in old-postcard colors by the Two-Strip Technicolor script for the GIMP.
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Carey Way, South Side
In Pittsburgh, a “rowhouse” is generally any house that shares a wall with its neighbors. But there are rowhouses in a stricter sense: rows of houses built all at once, as more or less one building divided into individual residences. One such row is in the 1800 block of Carey Way, a row of modest Italianate alley houses all put up at once. If he had to guess, old Pa Pitt would date it to the 1870s. One of its remarkable features is its breezeway. Most breezeways in Pittsburgh are narrow passages between houses, but this row has one breezeway in the middle big enough to drive a wagon through. That is probably the point: it leads to a courtyard from which deliveries of coal and other staples could be made to the backs of all the houses. Under separate ownership, the houses have ceased to be entirely identical, but their common origin is still apparent.
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Carriage House in Elliott
Old Pa Pitt is delighted to report that, since this picture was taken in the summer of 2000, this almost perfectly preserved carriage house has been restored and refurbished into a habitable building, with glass in the upper windows and other such modern conveniences (see the pictures below). Nevertheless, he reports it with a tiny bit of regret. There’s a fascination frantic in a ruin that’s romantic, and restoring the building inevitably takes it one more step away from its origin. Certainly it was good to restore it; the only alternative would have been to let it continue to decay and eventually vanish. But Father Pitt is happy that he was able to preserve this picture from the time when it had never been anything other than a carriage house.
An update: According to old maps, this seems to have been built in the 1880s; it appears in 1890 but not in 1882.
Note the perfect little I-house to the left of the carriage house.
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Wilson Drugs, Penn Main
The district around the intersection of Penn Avenue and Main Street is commonly called Penn Main; it’s on the border of Lawrenceville and Bloomfield, and functions as a secondary commercial spine for both neighborhoods. Because the streets do not meet at a right angle, the buildings on the corner are various odd Pittsburgh shapes. This attractive commercial building is an irregular pentagon. Wilson Drugs, one of the diminishing number of independent neighborhood drug stores in the city, seems frozen in 1948, in spite of its electronic displays.
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A New Server and Some Daylilies in the Rain
Old Pa Pitt has finally migrated away from WordPress.com to a server that places fewer restrictions on his site. (The address is still FatherPitt.com; all your links through that address should still work.) Almost all the content from the past fourteen and a half years has moved here, except (for some reason) the last two weeks’ worth of articles. Those will reappear soon. (Update: They have now been restored.) You can expect Father Pitt to be tinkering with the design of the site for a while.
Meanwhile, here are some daylilies in the rain, straight from the Olympus E-20N DSLR with no editing at all. The camera is officially old enough to buy its own alcoholic beverages this year, but it still takes pretty good pictures in glorious five-megapixel resolution.
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Brookline Methodist Episcopal Church
This church was finished in 1927 and continued to serve the Methodists until about a quarter-century ago. It now belongs to the Brookline Assembly, an Assemblies of God congregation. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to find out who the architect was, but there’s a wealth of other information at the wonderfully well-informed Brookline Connection site, including the interesting fact that the stone is Beaver County sandstone.
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Whiskey Rebellion Flag
The Whiskey Rebellion was a feckless, doomed-from-the-start insurrection pushed mostly by people who were in the habit of insurrecting and didn’t know how to stop. The Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution was only eleven years old, and many of the men who had settled in the west country of Pennsylvania had fought in that war. Now the wicked Easterners, who were scarcely better than British, were imposing an excise tax on whiskey, the staple product that made farming profitable in the West. No taxation without representation! Well, we had representation, but… Liberty and no excise! It was time for another revolution!
And then President Washington sent an army and, well, you know… We weren’t really serious about rebelling…
The “flag with six stripes” is often spoken of as raised by the rebels—the six stripes representing the six counties of the West. They had other flags as well; the elaborate one preserved at the Century Inn is the model for all the “Whiskey Rebellion” flags sold by historical souvenir specialists. But the six-striped flag seems to have been the most common. Old Pa Pitt does not know of any surviving examples, so his reconstruction above is speculative. Other speculative reconstructions add a canton with six stars, but that would turn a hastily improvised banner into a craft project. Since only the stripes are mentioned in our sources, Father Pitt suspects only the stripes were used. The reconstructed flag is an SVG file that can be used at any size without loss of resolution (not that there’s much to resolve), and—like all of Father Pitt’s illustrations—it is released into the public domain with a CC0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
The story of the Whiskey Rebellion is best told by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who was caught up in the middle of it and did his best to avert a civil war while also keeping himself alive—the latter of which was at least as difficult as the former. Brackenridge was Pittsburgh’s and the nation’s greatest literary figure in President Washington’s time, and he tells the story with the narrative skill of a practiced novelist and the humor of a famous wit.
This new carefully printed edition of Incidents of the Insurrection is the first in a series of important Pittsburgh books issued by the Franklin Head, a joint venture between Father Pitt and his old friend Dr. Boli.
Independence Day is a good day to reflect on the blessings we enjoy because of the surprising collective wisdom of the rabble we call our Founding Fathers. They bought us independence from Britain by a successful rebellion, but they also understood that perpetual rebellion is hell on earth. When we remember Washington and the rest today, we should remember that independence was one of their gifts, but orderly representative government was an even greater gift, and one they were just as willing to fight for.
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