The exceedingly improbable Skinny Building, which is five feet eight inches deep, seen in wintry December light. The picture was taken two years ago, but Father Pitt didn’t like the harsh lighting and high contrast in the original picture. Looking at it again just recently, he thought perhaps the lighting could be made into the subject of the picture if it were a black-and-white picture.
The building has been sold to PNC, which plans to display art in the upper floors.
One of the exceptionally elegant elevators in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Museums in Oakland.
This year’s Christmas tree lights up in animated falling-snowflake patterns.
A very Pittsburghish view: a cluttered urban streetscape, seen under a railroad viaduct, with an entirely different neighborhood (in this case Oakland) on the inaccessible hill in the distance.
An Art Deco interpretation of the skyscraper style old Pa Pitt calls “Mausoleum-on-a-Stick,” in which the cap of the skyscraper is patterned after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The architects, York & Sawyer, seem to have been taken with the style; they designed another Mausoleum-on-a-Stick building in the same year (1926) for Montreal. You can see a picture of it in one of old Pa Pitt’s earlier articles on Allegheny General Hospital.
The original skyscraper hospital was a marvel of practical hospital design. Everything radiates from a central core of elevators, and nothing is more than a few steps from the elevator. Later the hospital was expanded with new buildings in wildly mismatched styles, so that the complex has become the hopeless jungle of dead-end corridors and mismatched floors usual in big-city hospitals.
Sometimes old Pa Pitt decides to try some experiments with image editing. Here, for example, is a tree in color, with the rest of the picture in shades of grey. Was the result worth the effort? Well, possibly.
Pittsburgh is rich in great jazz pianists. Erroll Garner has been getting more attention lately, and Mary Lou Williams has seen a well-deserved revival. But no one seems to be talking about the one Father Pitt considers the greatest of all. So here, to jog some memories, is Earl Hines playing his own song “A Monday Date” in a recording from 1928. The record was much loved, so there’s a little fuzz around the edges. But the sound is otherwise excellent, and the genius of Fatha Hines glitters in every astonishing bar.
The curious urban clutter of Allegheny Center, a grand plan to build a completely new urban center for the North Side that, like most such plans from the 1960s, had at best only partial success. It destroyed almost the entire core of the old city of Allegheny, replacing it with modernist blocks and apartment warehouses. The clock tower at middle left marks the old Allegheny branch of the Carnegie Library, which stands at the end of a row of buildings preserved amidst the destruction. In the foreground, some of the millionaires’ mansions of Allegheny West.
