Father Pitt

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West End Methodist Episcopal Church
In 1888 the Allegheny County Courthouse was finished, and by then its influence in Pittsburgh had already been profound. H. H. Richardson predicted, correctly, that it would be his most famous work; he died in 1886 without seeing it completed, when the mania for “Richardsonian Romanesque” in Pittsburgh was only beginning. Fortunately several competent Romanesque architects were available to supply the buildings Richardson could no longer provide.

Although the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque on the building attributes it to Frank Alden of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, the architect was actually James P. Bailey, an accomplished designer of churches who took to the Richardsonian Romanesque style very well. The lot is difficult and unpromising, but Bailey’s design makes the irregular topography part of the romance.¹

The church is vacant at the moment; it would make a fine studio for some prosperous artist.

Connoisseurs of Victorian lettering will be delighted by the inscriptions.
1. This attribution has been updated. We originally accepted the PHLF attribution without question, until our correspondent David Schwing presented evidence we could not dismiss—a news story in the early stages of construction, showing Bailey’s design for the church, which is exactly as the church now stands: “A Busy Building Season,” Pittsburg Press, March 29, 1888, p. 6.
  
  Father Pitt does not like to disappear his mistakes, so here is the paragraph he originally wrote: “Frank E. Alden was the Alden of Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow. Longfellow himself had trained with Richardson, and his firm was regarded as the successor to Richardson’s. Here Alden fills a very unpromising lot with a romantically Romanesque pile, built in 1888 while the last stones were still falling into place in the courthouse.” ↩︎
May 22, 2022
Barge Train on the Mon

Father Pitt took this picture in November of 2000 from the Smithfield Street Bridge.

May 21, 2022
Early Daylilies

Every year old Pa Pitt gives you pictures of these daylilies, because every year they are the earliest to bloom. They came from an unnamed hybrid seedling, so it is very likely that this exact variety exists nowhere else on earth. Raindrops add a decorative effect to the pictures.

May 20, 2022
Grant Building from First Avenue

When Henry Hornbostel’s Grant Building first went up in 1929, it was festooned with Art Deco pinnacles that were removed decades ago. If you enlarge this picture of the south side of the building, you can just make out the shadows left by those vanished ornaments.

May 20, 2022
A Dim Religious Light

But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister’s pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full-voic’d quire below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.

——Milton, Il Penseroso.

It is difficult to convey in a photograph the impression we get from entering a glorious Gothic church like Heinz Chapel. In general photographs are too light, either because the photographers laudably attempted to capture the many artistic details of the Gothic interior, or because they used automatic exposure and let their cameras do the thinking. Old Pa Pitt has tried very hard in these pictures to give some impression of the relative lighting as we enter the chapel from the bright light outside. Most of the light is dim, but a pool of light shines in the distance, drawing us toward the altar.

No matter how bright it may be outside, turning to leave the church is walking away from the light.

May 19, 2022
Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association, Oakland

If your club was prospering, you could have a clubhouse by Benno Janssen, Pittsburgh’s favorite club architect. Among the club buildings he designed that are still standing we may mention the Twentieth Century Club, the Keystone Athletic Club, the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, the Masonic Temple, and this one, a cultural and athletic center that was one of the ancestors of today’s Jewish Community Center. Like several of Janssen’s other club buildings, this one, built in 1924, takes the form of a Renaissance palace. The building now belongs to Pitt, of course, which calls it Bellefield Hall and still keeps up its splendid indoor swimming pool.

The university has glassed in the huge arch that forms the main entrance; old Pa Pitt has ruthlessly manipulated this picture to bring the inscription out from behind the glass.

Father Pitt imagines the sculptor, having worked months to intertwine the letters Y, M, W, and H in this artistic cartouche, proudly presenting his work to Mr. Janssen and being told, “You left out the A.”

A view of the building from Heinz Chapel’s new formal garden across the street.

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May 19, 2022
Fifth Avenue in the 1990s

Father Pitt is not quite sure when he took this picture (some of his records are in a sorry state of disorganization), but it is easy to give it a rough date. In the middle distance we can see the Farmers Bank Building, with its mural of Pittsburgh sports legends by Judy Penzer, an artist who had the good luck to be the sister of a real-estate developer, and the bad luck to be on TWA Flight 800 when it exploded in 1996. That mural was painted in 1992, and the building was imploded in 1997 to make way for the new Lazarus department store.

The Farmers Bank Building was a great loss to our architectural legacy, but we could argue that it had been lost for three decades by the time it was demolished. It was built in 1903, one of our earliest batch of skyscrapers.

In the 1960s, the owners covered the embarrassingly passé Beaux-Arts exterior with a generic modernist shell, making the building indistinguishable from other International Style boxes except for being uglier. When the building was scheduled for demolition, there was some argument about whether the original exterior could be restored; but the indomitably bland personality of Mayor Murphy overcame all opposition to his project to fill downtown with department stores. Tom Murphy was a brilliant politician, probably the most powerful mayor since David Lawrence, but in this case he was badly misguided. Lazarus failed in a few years, and soon downtown went from four department stores to none at all.

May 18, 2022
Working on the Roof of Heinz Chapel

It’s easy to forget how tall Heinz Chapel is until we see people working on the roof.

May 17, 2022
Colonel Alexander Leroy Hawkins Memorial

Col. Hawkins was a state senator as well as a much-respected officer in the Spanish-American War, which America fought to free the Spanish colonies, and the ensuing Philippine insurrection, which America fought to keep her newly acquired colony. He died in 1899; this memorial was put up in 1904. Originally the base extended in an embracing curve, as we see in this old photograph from Historic Pittsburgh; the extensions were probably cut off when the approaches were built for the Panther Hollow Bridge.

In an earlier version of this article, Father Pitt had negligently typed “1894” instead of “1904” as the date of this memorial. It is harder than one thinks to cross the gap between centuries.

May 17, 2022
Storm Clouds

May 16, 2022