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Dismantling the Polar World

It was one of the oddest things in the Carnegie, and few people ever made it that far after an afternoon of gawking at dinosaurs: a whole gallery on the third floor, the Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life, dedicated to the “Polar World.” Now, after decades of informing visitors one or two at a time, the exhibit is finally being taken down. But it is being taken down slowly and carefully; and since the hall is also the only route in and out of the Alcoa Hall of American Indians—an exhibit even more invisible to most museum visitors, but one well worth your time—the few visitors who make it to the third floor have a chance to see what happens when a longstanding exhibit vanishes.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The space will be used for a greatly expanded Egyptian gallery, which will doubtless be more popular. But it will not be as odd. Every museum that can afford one has a good Egyptian gallery; few museums below the Arctic Circle had a gallery of Polar Life.

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August 31, 2026
FBI Building, South Side

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Pittsburgh field office, officially the Martha Dixon Building, looks like a Hollywood producer’s idea of a building FBI agents would work in. It is an outstanding example of the style old Pa Pitt calls neoneoclassical, in which the symmetry and forms of classical architecture are stripped of all ornaments like carved capitals or sculptured pediments that would shock the sensibilities of moderns. “To glamorize the four-story, 160,000 sq ft (15000 m²) structure, precast concrete components were used on the façade of the building.” So says an article in PCI Journal for November–December 2002, and Father Pitt would like to mark it as the first time he has seen the word “glamorize” applied to anything having to do with precast concrete. The result is a building that is designed to offend no one’s taste, and if you think that is easy you should try it some time. The architects were DRS Architects of Pittsburgh, who have also done offices for the DEA as well as some prominent buildings for local universities.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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August 31, 2026
Second Presbyterian Church, Wilkinsburg
Later known as the Mulberry Presbyterian Church. O. M. Topp and Charles W. Hutchison, “țhe well-known Pittsburg architect,” were the architects of this church, built in 1911.¹

In spite of his self-declared notability, Charles W. Hutchison has not left much of a visible architectural legacy: after some searching, old Pa Pitt found only two projects definitely attributable to him, of which this is one. It was probably his own church: he lived in Wilkinsburg. His moment of greatest fame came the year after this church was built, when his honeymoon trip was interrupted by the wreck of the Titanic: he and his bride were passengers on the Carpathia, the ship that picked up Titanic survivors. He sold his story, with a well-made diagram of the scene of the rescue, to the Press, which put him on the front page as “the well-known Pittsburg architect.”

Pittsburg Press, April 21, 1912, p. 1.

Olaf M. Topp, on the other hand, was a very successful architect with a long career ahead of him and much experience behind him. Half the prewar Lutheran churches in the Pittsburgh area were designed by Topp, in addition to a few for other denominations; and in secular buildings his greatest work was the still-lamented Jenkins Arcade.

A while ago this church was taken over by an organization with ambitious plans to turn it into a Center for Civic Arts. The plans seem to have run hard up against economic reality, however, and when old Pa Pitt visited recently the building was up for sale again.
1. “Cornerstone Laying Among Church Events,” Press, August 27, 1911. “The church was designed by O. M. Topp and Charles M. Hutchison.” The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation plaque has the architect as “F. Hoffman & Company,” but that was the contractor. ↩︎
August 30, 2026
St. Paul’s Cathedral, Oakland
These are far from the first pictures of this cathedral that old Pa Pitt has published, and they certainly will not be the last. A cathedral is too big a deal to take in all at once.

The west front (liturgically speaking¹) is a towering Gothic fantasy whose scale is hard to convey in a photograph. Here the human figures on the steps give us some context.

The main doors turn on the mightiest hinges in Pittsburgh.

This would be a magnificent main front for any church; here it is just the façade of the south transept.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

The south-transept entrance.

We have many more pictures of St. Paul’s from many years of passing by with a camera.
1. In describing church architecture, the altar is always considered “east,” which makes the entrance opposite the altar “west,” and so on, regardless of what your lying compass says. ↩︎
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August 30, 2026
Damselfly

Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

Sitting on the edge of a Hedge Bindweed (Calystegia sepium) flower blooming on a fence in Chateau. Old Pa Pitt’s best guess is that it is an Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis), but corrections are invited from the entomologically informed. We asked an AI bot, and the bot told us, “That’s probably a damselfly,” so the bot was dismissed with a polite thank-you and no reference letter.

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August 29, 2026
Two Apartment Buildings on Voelkel Avenue, Dormont

These apartment buildings are a riot of patterns in bricks. Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about them other than what we see in the pictures, but he would not be surprised if they were designed by Charles R. Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed many other small and medium-sized apartment buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon, and who was fond of using patterned bricks for decoration.

Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

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August 29, 2026
Apartment Building by Frederick Scheibler, Park Place

Before he fell under the spell of the European modernists, Frederick Scheibler had already developed his own distinct version of the classical style. Even if he had never progressed beyond the early style we see in this building from 1903, we would still think he was one of our more interesting minor architects.

The two-storey porch with a balcony dangling between the colossal columns is unusual—but not unprecedented. The Ruskin Villa apartment building in Wilkinsburg uses exactly the same idea, and in many other ways is similar to this building. In construction listings, L. A. Raisig was named as the architect of that building, which went up just a few months before Raisig took on young Frederick Scheibler as a partner. Father Pitt’s probably unprovable hypothesis is that Scheibler was already working for Raisig, and Raisig assigned the Ruskin Villa to him. This building in Park Place, then, would be a case of Scheibler adapting and refining ideas he had already worked out three years earlier.

Sony Alpha 3000.

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August 28, 2026
Some Houses on Cedar Avenue, Dutchtown

Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.

For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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August 27, 2026
The Arden, Park Place

An early building by Frederick Scheibler, built in 1904, when Scheibler had not yet fully embraced modernism, but was already well on his way. Even in his earliest buildings, Scheibler already had his own distinct quirks in the classical style he had adopted. He liked his classical details big, like the arches here.

And even in this early building, we already see Scheibler absorbing some of the Art Nouveau ideas that were wafting over from Austria and Germany. This entrance is like nothing else in Pittsburgh.

The building is a bit bedraggled now, but it does look as though what is necessary to keep it intact has been done.

Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens.

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August 26, 2026
The Chancery, Oakland

Edward J. Weber, who wrote the book on Catholic Church Buildings, was the architect of this little building, part of the cathedral complex and now known as the St. Paul Cathedral Center. This building and Synod Hall behind it were built in 1914.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

We have more pictures of the Chancery here.

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August 25, 2026

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