Looking south on South 16th Street toward the South Side Slopes. Note the large number of aluminum awnings, which used to be even more ubiquitous in Pittsburgh; the back streets of Old Birmingham are the best place to see them now.
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Terra-Cotta Ornaments on the Maul Building
The splendid terra-cotta facing of the Maul Building is covered with ornaments that may have been standard catalogue items, but nevertheless show considerable artistic talent.
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Tabernacle of the Union Baptist Church, South Side
This is a kind of machine-age Gothic, all sharp angles instead of the tapered points of more traditional Gothic forms. Built in 1881, this is no longer used as a church, but the exterior has been lovingly preserved.
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Sarah Street, Between 19th and 20th
Streetscape of Sarah Street, with typical South Side rowhouses, a small synagogue, and the South Side Presbyterian Church at the end of the block.
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Holy Assumption of St. Mary Orthodox Church, South Side
Clearly this was built as a Protestant church, but the Orthodox congregation has been here for quite some time now. Here we see the west front in the warm rays of the evening sun.
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Splendidly Victorian
Even on a splendidly Victorian street like Carson Street on the South Side, this building stands out as unusually ornate.
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French Marigolds
Old Pa Pitt uses various digital cameras that are cheap, old, or both; but when the desired effect is to make a foreground object stand out from the blurred background, it helps to have a DSLR. It helps even more to have a DSLR with a supplementary macro lens, which gives us a very shallow depth of field. The camera that took these pictures is an Olympus E-20n, which is old enough to vote and next year will be old enough to drink. But as long as it keeps taking pictures like these, old Pa Pitt will keep it in the camera bag.
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Herron Hill Pumping Station
Why shouldn’t a water-pumping station look like a Roman basilica? It’s what the Romans would have done. This substantial building was designed by William Smith Fraser, and it has its own appropriately substantial Wikipedia article. Unfortunately the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority has thought it necessary to brick up the windows, so that what used to be an airy temple of technology must be like a tomb inside now.
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Gailliot Center for Newman Studies
There is still at least one architect in Pittsburgh who can work in the Gothic idiom with modern materials. His name is David J. Vater, and he designed this building on Dithridge Street (which opened in 2007) and the Ryan Catholic Newman Center around the corner on Bayard Avenue. His listing on Porch.com has this to say about his firm: “Based in Pittsburgh, David J Vater Ra is an architectural firm that provides bathroom design, site planning, and master planning as well as other services.” The fact that bathroom design is mentioned first suggests that the demand for grand Gothic institutional buildings is low.
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