Jeannette is a pleasant little city in the eastern suburbs. Downtown is not as lively as it used to be, but it does have this one fine Art Deco office building, which is poetically named the Jeannette Office Building.
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How Pittsburgh Neighborhoods Got Their Names
East Liberty
Over at Mental Floss, an interesting article tells us How 65 Pittsburgh Neighborhoods Got Their Names. Someone pointed out the article to old Pa Pitt, and he immediately noticed that three of the pictures were his. These are pictures he has donated to Wikimedia Commons, as he does most of his pictures these days, and he is delighted to see that people are finding them as useful as he had hoped.
Carrick
Garfield
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Concordia Club
The Concordia Club was one of a number of fine clubs in Oakland; it lasted until 2009, when its building was sold to the University of Pittsburgh, which made it into the O’Hara Student Center. It was founded “to promote social and literary entertainment among its members,” and it seems always to have been a largely Jewish organization. Father Pitt does not know the details of the sale, but it took at least the club’s Web site by surprise. The site is frozen in 2009, with a calendar of events whose last entry is April 30, 2009: Annual Meeting and Dinner.
The building itself was designed by the prolific Charles Bickel, who could always be relied on to make the client proud.
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West Homestead
An old school on the hill in West Homestead, seen in sunset light through the row of smokestacks left from the old Homestead Works.
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Red Spider
Having constructed her web, a beautiful red spider sits and waits and thinks, “If only I had a book to read…”
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Thompson’s Restaurant Building
Thompson’s was a Chicago restaurant chain that pioneered many of the ideas we associate with modern chain restaurants. It specialized in lunches for hurried businessmen. There were several in Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century; this one on Market Street just off the Diamond is beautifully restored.
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Fountain and Gardens, Highland Park
The fountain and formal gardens in Highland Park, seen from the stairs to the reservoir. Beyond is the grand entrance to the park, with Giuseppe Moretti’s “Welcome” group.
Camera: Canon PowerShot S45.
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Welcome Sculptures by Giuseppe Moretti at the Highland Avenue Entrance to Highland Park
One of Pittsburgh’s two most famous and most prolific sculptors (the other being Frank Vittor), Giuseppe Moretti decorated the entrances to Highland Park with extraordinary bronzes. Note that these two opposite figures are matching but entirely different: Moretti sculpted them from two different models and posed them differently, thus making literally twice as much work for himself as an ordinary sculptor would.
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In the Two-Color Forest
Another experiment with limited color. Old Pa Pitt enjoys all kinds of photographic experiments, but in this case he has a particular reason for presenting this picture this way: it was a photograph that could not be easily rescued in full color.
You may see the original color photo below if you really want to see it. Father Pitt will draw back the curtain for a moment and reveal the insignificant man with the levers and switches.
In spite of much manipulation, including a gradient filter applied in the GIMP, the highlights are still bleached out completely, making it look like a picture from a cheap cell phone rather than Pa Pitt’s treasured Olympus E-20n.
Full-color image. The upper part was darkened with a gradient filter, but the highlights are still blasted into pure white. Reducing the saturation made it look more artificial without making it look more attractive.
Reducing the saturation just made the picture look a bit unhealthy. But somehow imitation two-strip Technicolor made an attractive image. In the words of Michelangelo, go figure.
