There’s nothing quite like the Buhl Building, on Fifth Avenue at Market Street. Here we see the east side of it. This side faces an alley, but there’s no stinting on the decoration, which looks like it was copied from a Wedgwood plate.
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Old Stone Tavern, West End
If the date “1752” found etched in a cornerstone is correct, then this is the oldest building in the English colonies west of the Alleghenies. That date would make it older than the Fort Pitt Blockhouse by twelve years. Father Pitt tends to doubt the authenticity of the date; but there is no doubt that this is a very old building, almost certainly from the 1700s, and one that ought to be preserved at all costs.
Update: The building is now generally regarded as dating from 1782, which is still very old for a stone building in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s Old Stone Tavern Friends Trust is trying to get enough money together to preserve this building. If you have extra money sitting around and were wondering what to do with it, here is a suggestion.
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Waterfall in Fox Chapel
A stream tumbles down into a hollow in the woods in Fox Chapel. Spring rains have swollen all the streams and made delightful waterfalls everywhere,
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Bandstand in West End Park
Old Pa Pitt is very fond of West End Park. Given a small and implausibly vertical site, the designers created a delightful neighborhood oasis, with distinguished landscape design, art, and architecture, while at the same time leaving enough woodland for a pleasant nature walk through the forest. This splendid bandstand was designed by architect Thomas Scott. All it needs is a band, instead of the big institutional picnic table that occupies it now.
[NOTE: In an earlier version of this article Father Pitt, relying on someone else’s information, identified the architect of the bandstand as William R. Perry, who also designed the Catholic church of St. Bernard in Mount Lebanon. Perry designed other elements in the park, including the architectural parts of the war memorial, but Thomas Scott designed the bandstand.]
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Urban Archaeology
Mysteries abound in a city when it’s had two and a half centuries to accumulate them. This old foundation in West End Park has obviously been here for a while. How old is it? The land for the park was bought in 1875; was this a little farmhouse from before that time? Father Pitt would be happy to hear from anyone who knows more about the history of this structure.
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War Memorial at West End Park
This little out-of-the-way park on a steep knob overlooking the West End Valley has one of Pittsburgh’s least-known memorials by one of Pittsburgh’s best-known sculptors. Frank Vittor, creator of some of our most prominent public art, designed this memorial for the soldiers who fought in the First World War.
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Low-Tech Film Scanner
If you look through Father Pitt’s archives, you may see that Father Pitt used to do many of his pictures on film with a motley collection of ancient cameras. Lately those cameras have not seen much use, largely because Father Pitt’s old transparency scanner died, and it’s expensive to get a scanner that handles medium-format film.
A while ago old Pa Pitt heard of a photographer who used a light table and a digital camera to digitize large-format negatives. Would the same technique work for medium-format negatives? It might, but would one want to invest in a decent light table without knowing that it would? It would be better to have some proof of concept, as an engineer might say. If only it were possible to create an inexpensive light table, good enough to try out the idea and see whether it might work…
Father Pitt stared for an hour at the screen on his laptop computer, looking through various Web sites for ideas for a home-made light table. They all seemed to require materials that would cost almost as much as a commercial light table.
And then, after many sites, a light bulb suddenly lit up over Pa Pitt’s head. He was staring at a laptop screen. A laptop screen is a backlit flat surface. If we open up a blank text document and maximize it to fill the screen, we have a light table. Father Pitt was tempted to slap his forehead, but feared the effects on his periwig.
Here’s a picture of the Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park, taken on 120 film and digitized with the laptop light table and a digital camera. Obviously the laptop light table is not a permanent solution: you can see the pixel grid too clearly. But for a quick look at what’s on the negative, it works surprisingly well. More importantly, it shows that a proper light table would probably be just as good as a mid-priced film scanner, and much cheaper.
So Father Pitt’s 620 Special and his Speedex and all his other favorite cameras can come out of their forced retirement. It turns out that there’s an astonishingly cheap and simple way to digitize medium-format film.
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Cleaning Up After the 1936 Pittsburgh Flood
Here we have a short film, whose source is unidentified, of some of the cleanup after the St. Patrick’s Day Flood in 1936. It seems to be amateur footage, but it’s good enough to show us what a mess everything was. (It seems to be impossible to embed correctly on wordpress.com, so you’ll actually have to leave this site to see it. But hurry on back.)
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Jellyfish at PPG Aquarium
Jellyfish at the PPG Aquarium in Pittsburgh from Father Pitt on Vimeo.
This wonderfully graceful jellyfish does its slow ballet all day long at the PPG Aquarium, on the grounds of the Pittsburgh Zoo in Highland Park. Note that there is no sound with this video, since the jellyfish really had very little to say.