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St. Francis Central Hospital, at the right of the picture, has been replaced by a hotel.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.
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View from the Rotunda of Penn Station in 2000
A view from the rotunda of Penn Station, taken in 2000 with an Argus A, a 35-millimeter camera made by the Argus Camera Company in the 1930s. It was meant to capitalize on the popularity of the very expensive Leica without being anything like as expensive as the Leica. It is not a particularly good camera, but it is small, and it is durable, and if you treat it right you can get pictures like this out of it.
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World War I Memorial, West End Park
West End Park is far off the beaten track, and few people outside its own neighborhood (which is technically Elliott, though it belongs at least as much to the West End) ever visit, or even know it exists. But it has one of our best war memorials by one of our best sculptors and one of our best architects.
The sculptor was Frank Vittor, who was already developing the streamlined style that would make him one of Pittsburgh’s two favorite sculptors (the other being Giuseppe Moretti). The architect was William Perry, whose most famous work is St. Bernard’s in Mount Lebanon, a church more magnificent than many cathedrals. Their collaboration produced a striking monument, simple but rich. Unfortunately some restoration has left it with two radically different colors of stone and concrete, which is not how it was meant to look, as we see in this picture from twenty-two years ago:
That picture shows us that the memorial has also lost some sort of bronze ornament on the bottom half of the shaft: we can see the shadow of what seems to have been a shield with double-headed axe set in a bronze band. (Addendum: The book Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture, by Vernon Gay and Marilyn Evert, shows the ornament in place, with a bronze band all the way around the base. That book was published in 1983.)
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The Tallest Stained-Glass Windows in the World
That is the claim made for the transept windows in Heinz Chapel, and old Pa Pitt accepts it until someone proves otherwise. They were created by the studio of Charles Z. Connick.
The windows trace Christian history down from Christ to American heroes like Abraham Lincoln, shown here freeing slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation.
Father Pitt’s very favorite detail in these windows is in the Lincoln pane. In fact it is one of his favorite details in any stained glass anywhere. You probably won’t even notice it as you look at the heroic figure of Lincoln, but here it is:
This scowling cartoon-villain plantation owner, furious that some Northern abolitionist scum has the temerity to interfere with his right to whip his own property, is the perfect background for Lincoln. One feels that the whole Civil War was worth the trouble just to make this man frown.
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The Little Phipps Conservatory at Clayton
Henry Clay Frick really liked the Phipps Conservatory in Schenley Park when it went up in 1892. He liked it so well that he said, “I want one of those in my back yard,” and hired Alden & Harlow to design it. (You can do that when you’re a robber baron.) They gave him a miniature of Phipps Conservatory, with a central greenhouse large enough for substantial citrus trees.
These pictures were taken in March of 2000 with a Kodak Pony 135.
