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
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St. Francis Central Hospital, at the right of the picture, has been replaced by a hotel.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
St. James Church was a Catholic parish that closed in 2004. For a while, when the West End was unsuccessfully vying with Lawrenceville to become the next artsy-trendy neighborhood, the building was an art gallery; then, in 2015, it reopened as “St. James Roman Catholic Church.” The slightly ostentatious adoption of the title “Roman Catholic” might suggest to the initiated that this is not a church in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. It belongs to a congregation of the Society of St. Pius X, the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, who repudiate Vatican II and all its works and all its pomps.
The building was put up in 1884 for a congregation founded thirty years earlier; old Pa Pitt has not been able to determine who the architect was. (The name is not mentioned in the centennial book the congregation published in 1954.) Neighbors in the West End are delighted to have the church building well taken care of.
Little groundhogs grow up to be big fat groundhogs very quickly, especially if we feed them all our spring lettuce and radishes.
The tower of Calvary Episcopal Church, one of three Ralph Adams Cram churches in Pittsburgh, bathed in sunset light, from pictures Father Pitt took in 1999.
