Built in 1921 for the Keystone Grocery and Tea Company, a grocery chain that did not live a long life (Father Pitt has not been able to find any reference to it after 1927), this is now Shannon Hall, student housing for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It is a fine example of how a utilitarian building can be made, if not beautiful, at least not ugly, by well-worked-out proportions and a tasteful choice of materials.
“Towers in a Park” was the ideal urban paradise of the International Style architects. It seldom worked well, and Father Pitt will tell you why: because the architects concentrated on the towers, and neglected the park. Gateway Center is one of the few really successful towers-in-a-park developments, and it is successful because the park is so attractive—benches everywhere, beautiful landscaping, and (of course) the vendors’ tents of the Three Rivers Arts Festival every June.
This was a store where you could buy everything, from groceries to clothes to furniture. It was most definitely not the company store for the J&L steel mill nearby, because of course such company stores were illegal in Pennsylvania. Coincidentally, however, the corporation’s list of directors was exactly the same as the list of directors of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, and the store accepted the scrip in which the workers were paid, which could be used nowhere else.
The building was as magnificent as some of the downtown department stores; and, after serving as the local headquarters of Goodwill Industries for three and a half decades, it is now beautifully restored as very expensive luxury apartments under the name “The Brix at 26.”
Father Pitt is not an entomologist. He believes this damselfly to be a female Ebony Jewelwing (Calopteryx maculata): note the spot on the upper end of the wing. But any entomologist or informed damselfly fan is invited to correct his identification—and to answer a question: do the red eyes indicate a young specimen?
A panoramic view of the Oakland medical-intellectual complex, as seen from Schenley Park just after sunset.
This building now houses the Wood Street station on the ground floor (and below, of course) and the Wood Street Galleries, a free museum of installation art, on the upper floors. It was put up for the Monongahela National Bank, and the architect was Edward Stotz, who also gave us Schenley High School—another triangular classical building. It makes one wonder whether Mr. Stotz printed “Specialist in Triangles” on his business cards.
The elevator towers at the corners are later additions. They make a mess of the carefully worked out proportions of the building—Father Pitt thinks they make the whole structure look a bit like a fat rabbit—but at least they are done with similar materials.
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
Father Pitt has just published this article on his Pittsburgh Cemeteries site, but he thought it might also be of interest to students of local history in general.
“Pastor Russell,” as his followers called him, founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and the International Bible Students Association, the organization that—after various schisms and defections—came to be known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was born in Allegheny (now the North Side), and when he died he was buried in what is now (after a number of changes of ownership) the Rosemont, Mt. Hope, & Evergreen United Cemeteries in Ross Township.
His fairly modest grave monument includes a photograph of Pastor Russell, lovingly preserved (and perhaps replaced more than once over the years).
Note the inscription identifying Pastor Russell as the Laodicean Messenger, or “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans,” as the King James Bible translates it (Revelation 3:14). Russell’s followers believed that he himself was that angel or messenger.
Russell died in 1916. In 1921, some of his followers erected a showier monument in the form of a pyramid. One of Russell’s odd beliefs was that the Great Pyramid in Egypt was designed by God himself as a prophecy in stone. Like most such prophecies, it was meant to be uninterpretable until the correct clever interpreter came along—in this case, Pastor Russell.
This is actually one of the few cemetery pyramids in the Pittsburgh area whose proportions are Egyptian rather than classical Roman. It is meant to have the same proportions as the Great Pyramid, and in particular the capstone is carefully proportioned to match the Great Pyramid’s capstone, which in Pastor Russell’s interpretation represents the Christ.
The pyramid was meant as a marker not only for Russell, but for a number of other members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, who owned this plot in the cemetery. A few names are inscribed in the open Bibles on the four sides of the pyramid, but most of the blank space was never used. It seems that the separate ownership of this plot has been preserved through the various changes of ownership the rest of the cemetery has gone through.
The adorability meter just broke, shattered into atoms by readings it was never meant to handle. This little fawn was resting against a monument in the Rosemont, Mt. Hope, & Evergreen United Cemeteries. Deer love cemeteries, both because there is practically unlimited forage and because no one ever molests them there.
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