Father Pitt

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Rapid Transit to Oakland

A good transit link between downtown and Oakland would change Pittsburgh from a city with very good, even enviable, rapid transit to a leader in North American transit. It would certainly stimulate development along the route, and that would make some very good money for clever investors who see the opportunity clearly.

Here’s your chance to be one of those clever investors. Are a few hundred million dollars just burning a hole in your pocket? Why not give us the last essential link in our already enviable rapid-transit system?

Click on the image for a PDF map.

The Redevelopment Authority of Allegheny County has set up a Web site where interested parties can submit proposals. If you always fancied yourself a streetcar baron or a monorail mogul, here’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

You can read more about the project in the Post-Gazette.

February 24, 2010
Digging Out

A street in Beechview after the blizzard. Often the only way to dig out your car is to bury your neighbor’s car. Your neighbor then buries his neighbor’s car, and so on down the street.

February 11, 2010
Parking Chair

When the snow is deep and every parking space represents half a day’s work, the parking chairs come out in full force. Chairs are traditional guardians of residents’ parking rights in city neighborhoods where driveways are rare; though they are not strictly legal, they have the force of etiquette, which is stronger than law. The driver who would move someone else’s chair to park in the space it guards is capable of any enormity. Usually the chairs are half-broken kitchen chairs kept in the basement for just this purpose, but this particularly elegant chair reserved a spot in Beechview. Whether the bird feeder is functional or ornamental is a question old Pa Pitt was not able to answer.

February 10, 2010
The Blizzard of 2010

The heavy snow broke branches and brought down cables everywhere, but in the sunlight the snow was beautiful enough to make us forget the inconveniences.

February 8, 2010
It Snowed a Bit

The fourth-deepest snow—about two feet in many neighborhoods—in recorded Pittsburgh history fell on February 5 and 6. The weight of the stuff brought down huge trees and cut off electric power to hundreds of thousands, some of whom are still without power three days later. (Old Pa Pitt himself is forced to post this article as a guest on someone else’s connection.) These scenes are from a woody lot in Mount Lebanon.

The snow bowed these arborvitae trees into graceful arches, although this particular sort of grace is usually unwelcome in traditional landscape planting.

This big maple tree came down across a driveway; here we see it already showing the marks of the bowsaw that some day will finish disassembling it.

February 8, 2010
“The Rosary” by Ethelbert Nevin

After Stephen Foster, Ethelbert Nevin is Pittsburgh’s most famous composer. Like Chopin, Nevin seldom attempted anything longer than five minutes or so (Chopin did a couple of piano concertos, but who remembers them nowadays?). Also like Chopin, he died young (at the age of 39, just like Chopin). Unlike Chopin, he has been almost forgotten, but when he died in 1901 he was one of the great names in light classical music. “Narcissus” and “Gondolieri” remained in the parlor-piano repertory until people forgot how to play pianos and stopped building houses with parlors.

One of Nevin’s most famous compositions was “The Rosary,” Here is a recording (MediaFire link) by the great viola player William Primrose, accompanied by the mediocre conductor Charles O’Connell and the Victor Symphony Orchestra. This recording was taken from a beat-up 78-RPM Victor Red Seal record, and the conversion to MP3 has muddied it a bit. If you want the original WAV file, it’s here (another MediaFire link), but be aware that it’s nearly 15 megabytes. The surface noise is not too distracting, and the performance brings out all the sentimentality that made “The Rosary” such a big hit.

It appears that this recording has been allowed to lapse into the public domain. If there is a copyright owner who objects to Father Pitt’s making it available here, Father Pitt will be happy to remove it.

January 29, 2010
Phipps by Night

A massive glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly hangs in the dome of the entrance to Phipps Conservatory. The conservatory is open until 10:00 Friday nights.

January 23, 2010
Snow on Belgian Block

A frosty morning on one of the many Belgian-block streets in Beechview. In neighborhoods of this vintage (about the beginning of the twentieth century), Belgian block was usually reserved for steep hills like this one, and cheaper brick pavements used for the flat spots. Brick lasts almost as long as Belgian block, but it gives very poor traction in wet or icy conditions.

January 9, 2010
Lower Gatehouse of Allegheny Cemetery

The Butler Street gatehouse was part of the original design of the cemetery in the 1840s, and it serves its function perfectly. From a busy city street we enter a romantic fantasy landscape that might have come straight from Sir Walter Scott. The contrast is almost as great as the contrast between life and afterlife.

January 1, 2010
Smallman Street in the Strip

It seems typical of Pittsburgh that the city’s grandest spaces are in warehouse and industrial districts. This broad plaza, seen from St. Stanislaus Kostka church on 21st Street, is the heart of the wholesale-food business in Pittsburgh. In the last two decades it has also become a popular nightclub district. The wholesale business begins to pick up just as the clubs close in the small hours of the morning.

December 30, 2009