Another moving still picture: a barge heads downstream past the Armstrong Cork Factory toward the Sixteenth Street Bridge.
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Caterpillar
A caterpillar of the Hickory Tussock Moth (Lophocampa caryae) crawls through the leaves.
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Union Church, Robinson Township
Formerly Union Presbyterian Church, this congregation has been here more than two centuries. In the adjacent burying ground are several Revolutionary War veterans, and the hilltop church with the cemetery below is irresistibly picturesque.
Old Pa Pitt, however, could not get a good picture of the church today, because he was there in the afternoon when the sun was shining in the wrong direction. So instead he gives you the next best thing, which is an atmospheric picture. You can always compensate for a picture’s defects by turning it black and white and calling it art.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked).
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Mushrooms in Schenley Park
To Father Pitt’s untrained eye they look like boletes of some sort. He will not attempt an exact identification, because he is not very well informed in fungal matters.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked).
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Carnegie Library, South Side Branch
Another branch library by Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architectural firm, Alden & Harlow, who also gave us (as Longfellow, Alden & Harlow) the main Carnegie Institute building in Oakland.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked).
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Differential Grasshopper
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.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS (hacked).
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Eberhardt & Ober Brewery, Dutchtown
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.
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Grape Vines in Schenley Park
KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA Grape vines can cover acres, blanketing everything in their way to form a surreal topiary.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
