A Differential Grasshopper (Melanoplus differentialis) on a seedhead of Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) in Schenley Park. These grasshoppers are sometimes destructive to crops, but they can have all the Queen Anne’s Lace they want. There’s plenty to go around.
Eberhardt & Ober was one of Pittsburgh’s favorite beers for many years—E & O, for “Early and Often,” as the advertisements put it. (What a cheery slogan—and yet one that would probably not be tolerated today.) The building is a fine example of German-American brewery architecture.
Mr. Eberhardt and Mr. Ober were not only business partners, but also friends for life—and even beyond life.
Though Eberhardt & Ober conscientiously brewed beer to the strict German standards of purity, the beer that comes out of this building now is probably better than anything E & O ever produced. This is now the home of the Penn Brewery, which—in addition to making some very good beer—operates a restaurant serving the kind of German food that makes beer sing.
The buildings you see here are on Vinial Street, which is the arbitrary dividing line on city planning maps between East Allegheny and Troy Hill. No sane Pittsburgher would call this Troy Hill, though, or say that the brewery is in a different neighborhood from the bottling plant a few yards across the street. By any reasonable standard, the brewery is in Dutchtown—which, fortunately, is not an official neighborhood name, and so can have any arbitrary boundaries common usage would like to assign to it.
Addendum: The architect of the buildings was Joseph Stillburg, one of our most successful mid-Victorian architects. Many of his buildings are gone, but his influence on Pittsburgh architecture was huge. Teenage Frederick Osterling worked in Stillburg’s office, where he would have seen firsthand how to manage the kind of large architectural operation that his own practice later became.
Grape vines can cover acres, blanketing everything in their way to form a surreal topiary.
Sometimes one finds things one didn’t know one was looking for. Father Pitt had decided to visit Rosedale Cemetery in Ross Township, a small German cemetery that does not show up on many maps, and here it was: the Osterling family monument, with “Fred J. Osterling” inscribed on it. By the dates we know that this is Frederick Osterling, the great architect, and the monument itself is so strikingly tasteful that one suspects Mr. Osterling designed it himself for his parents.
Frederick Osterling is responsible for some of the most important buildings in Pittsburgh:
The Union Trust Building
The Armstrong Cork Factory
The Westinghouse “Castle”
The Arrott Building
The morgue
The Times Building
—among many others. His career pretty much ended with the Union Trust Building, however; the client, Henry Frick, refused to pay Osterling’s fee when the construction ran late, and Osterling sued. After a decade in various courts, the case of Osterling v. Frick ended in victory for Osterling; but meanwhile it seems that Frick, who was good at holding grudges, had made sure Osterling would never work again. On the other hand, it seems he didn’t really need to work: when he died in 1934, Osterling left an estate valued at a million dollars, which was a good bit of money in those days.
The Bertha Osterling whose name appears below Fred’s name is one of Frederick’s sisters, who apparently never married. Frederick never married, either; but, when he died with a million dollars in his estate, he left $10,000 of it to a certain Martha O. Aber in a handwritten codicil to his will (the rest went to his sisters Bertha and Anna). This woman then claimed to be his secret wife, and demanded a much larger share of the estate. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened after that.
The Teutonia Männerchor in Dutchtown is a strange and happy anomaly: most of the old German singing societies have long since vanished, but the Teutonia is flourishing. This amazing half-timbered building was designed by the relatively obscure Charles Ott, and it certainly does look like a little bit of Germany.
The Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh once was filled with elite clubs. Many of the buildings have been absorbed by the ever-expanding University of Pittsburgh, but the Twentieth Century Club—a name that sounded dashing and futuristic when the club was founded in 1894—remains, still a private women’s club. The building is larger than it looks, and the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh has been staging its summer season here for the past few years.
Every so often, Father Pitt rifles through his archives and finds perfectly good pictures that, for one reason or another, he never got around to publishing. This one was taken in October of 2013.
From the shore of the Allegheny. The immensity of the U. S. Steel Tower is particularly obvious from this angle.
North Zion Lutheran Church is about a mile due south of Zion Lutheran Church in Baldwin Borough. Father Pitt will leave worrying about the cardinal directions to foreigners; Pittsburghers expect everything to be turned upside-down or sideways. The main part of the little church was built in 1859, and the congregation that inhabits it has been here for more than two centuries. Burials in the graveyard adjacent go back to 1812, but the earliest legible tombstones seem to be from the 1840s.
Frederick Osterling, one of Pittsburgh’s most interesting architects, designed the Armstrong Cork Company buildings, a masterpiece of functional yet attractive industrial architecture. They have now been turned into expensive loft apartments. You can see the buildings from a different angle here.
This colorful beetle (Megacyllene robiniae) is very destructive to locust trees in its larval stage; but since Pittsburgh has an infinite supply of locust trees, we need not worry about it. Probably these creatures are the only things that keep the locust trees from taking over and imposing martial law. The adult beetle looks very dashing in its striped livery. It eats goldenrod pollen, which means that our Locust Borers are very happy right now.
