It took tons of beautifully cast bronze to make the grand entrances on the original Carnegie Institute building, as opposed to the modern entrance in the Scaife Galleries addition, which takes a bunch of glass doors ordered from a catalogue.
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Mount Lebanon Cemetery Office
This fine vernacular-Gothic house serves as the gatehouse and office for the Mount Lebanon Cemetery, which was founded in 1901. It’s charmingly out of place in its neighborhood, which is a later development where most of the houses date from after the First World War.
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Romanesque Capital on the Music Building
The Music Building at the University of Pittsburgh was originally a house designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow for the pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church across the street. It has been expanded for institutional use, but with some effort made to keep the expansion in sympathy with the original house.
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Victory Building (in Better Light)
Old Pa Pitt published a nearly identical picture of the Victory Building a while ago, but he was unhappy with the patch of blinding sunlight that washed out one corner of it. Here is the same view in more even lighting.
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The Noble Quartet
Science, art, music, literature: these were Andrew Carnegie’s “Noble Quartet,” to which he dedicated his colossal gift to Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institute. To represent these four disciplines, Carnegie’s favorite sculptor, J. Massey Rhind, gave us Galileo, Michelangelo, Bach, and Shakespeare.
An interesting question: would we make the same choices today? Perhaps. But if we were to change the list, old Pa Pitt might suggest John Brashear, Andy Warhol, Earl Hines, and August Wilson. Not that he has any regional prejudices.
Galileo dwarfs that little Atlas fellow.
Michelangelo works on a model.
Bach thinks musical thoughts.
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Tunnel Park on a Misty Evening
Tunnel Park in the SouthSide Works isn’t very picturesque, especially in the winter; and yet anything can be picturesque with a layer of mist added.
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Construction on the Rachel Carson Bridge
The Ninth Street or Rachel Carson Bridge is closed for construction for a while. Here we see it in early-morning light.
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945 Liberty Avenue
From the days when this part of Liberty Avenue was mostly warehouses and light industry, this building, nicely restored, shows how much effort once went into ornamenting at least the front even of a utilitarian commercial structure.
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More Art Deco in Mount Lebanon
Though it currently houses a real-estate agency, the terra-cotta reliefs tell us that this was built as a medical office. The splendid Art Deco eagle made it a very patriotic medical office.
