The narrow streets and sudden drops in Troy Hill make for some unusual adaptations. Stuffed into a tiny lot, Grace Lutheran Church is as tall as it is long, with its main sanctuary on the second floor. It’s impossible to get a picture of the building without wires in front, and removing the wires with an image editor would be dishonest, which is Father Pitt’s way of saying “too much work.”
Phipps Conservatory is being held up as an example of what makes Pittsburgh a model to the world. Troops of presidents and prime ministers will shortly descend on it, and yesterday the place was crawling with State Department suits flashing their badges and working out the thorny details of who stands where for the photo opportunities.
It would be hard to think of a better showpiece for Pittsburgh. This is one of the world’s most beautiful glasshouses, a rare relic of classic Victorian Gothic conservatory architecture. Yet it has adapted to the modern age with a new entry and a spectacular tropical forest, both of which are remarkable for their use of “green” technology. The new entry, seen here, harmonizes well with the original greenhouses; yet the design is clearly a product of our own age. Pittsburgh can help teach the world how to make the old new again; and perhaps, in teaching that lesson, we can learn it better ourselves.
Hans Godo Fräbel is hard to pin down. Sometimes his style is abstract, sometimes breathtakingly realistic—or perhaps the word is surrealistic, with realistic figures in impossible situations. In every style his glass is impeccably precise. Dale Chihuly’s works seemed to grow organically from the soil of Phipps Conservatory; in the same setting, Fräbel’s glass almost seems to have been generated by a computer incapable of imperfection.
Death is certainly worthwhile if the reward of it is this ideal romantic landscape.
Click on the image for a PDF copy.
Update: The map above is Father Pitt’s latest map of Pittsburgh rapid transit. This article is kept here for historical reasons, but the map below is out of date.
—
The new Transit Development Plan has changed [updated from “will change”] the names of the streetcar lines from route numbers to colors, which is so obviously sensible that Father Pitt wonders why no one thought of it before.
Here is Father Pitt’s revised map of Pittsburgh rapid transit, which takes the changes into account:
Once again, old Pa Pitt attempts to explain what he means by “rapid transit.” For Father Pitt, “rapid transit” is any form of mass transit that runs on its own dedicated track: in other words, what the Port Authority calls “fixed-guideway systems,” a lovely slice of terminology that would warm the cockles of a bureaucrat’s heart if there were any cockles in there. That includes trolleys or streetcars, the subway (which is just the streetcars running underground), and the inclines, all of which run on rails. It also includes the busways, which are completely grade-separated tracks that run like metro lines.
The HOV lanes on the Parkway North are included as “rapid bus” routes on the Port Authority’s new system map (available here in PDF format), but not here; see an explanation at the earlier version of this map.
So far we have what is, which old Pa Pitt is delighted to find is at least halfway to what ought to be. For the next step, Fathr Pitt will soon provide another map—one that shows how the Pittsburgh Metro ought to work.
The style of architecture called Egyptian Revival had its heyday in the 1920s. In Pittsburgh it is almost always associated with death: we find it especially in mausoleums and in memorial dealers. The style always teeters on the edge of kitsch unless, as here, it is handled with restraint and taste. The setting of this mausoleum, under the shade of mighty trees, gives it a calm dignity it probably didn’t have when it was built.
Andy Warhol, whose life and art are memorialized in the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist, was often accused of dealing in junk. Oddly enough, other branches of his family (who have kept the original Slovak spelling of their name) are in a similar business.
Everything old Pa Pitt remembers about Col. Alexander Leroy Hawkins is inscribed on the Spanish-American War Monument in Schenley Park. No one seems to think of him today, but he was obviously all the rage in 1899, when he died at sea. He was a hero of the Spanish-American War; he died during the the subsequent Philippine Insurrection, when the ungrateful natives, entirely disregarding the proven fact that the United States was a much nicer colonial power than Spain, attempted to set up their own republican government on their own terms, forcing the Americans to crush all resistance in order to guarantee them a republican form of government.
Mark Twain was one of the most vocal opponents of “American imperialism,” and he used the now-familiar term “quagmire” to describe our involvement in the Philippines:
I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.
Once there was a lively little Slovak neighborhood at the north end of the 16th Street Bridge. Today almost nothing remains of it except one crumbling abandoned church (most recently used as a daycare center); the rectory, now divided into apartments; and one substantial building between them, hideously deformed by an addition that must have been designed to express the builder’s seething hatred of beauty and proportion.
North Catholic High School in Troy Hill was built in 1940. Its greatest claim to distinction is the set of unique reliefs by Charles Bradley Warren illustrating “The Pursuit of Knowledge.” “Unique” is a word thrown about with little regard for its etymological meaning, but here it seems descriptive. Where else will we find any similar combination of Catholic iconography, Art Deco style, and scientific progressivism? The reliefs are a little grimy from decades of heavy industry in the valley below, but they have lost none of their power to astonish a first-time visitor to Troy Hill.
No, old Pa Pitt has not reversed one of the photographs. These are two different reliefs over doors on opposite sides of the building, identical except that they are mirror images of one another. In each relief, the monkish scientists gazing into the distance are turned to face a stunning view of the Allegheny valley and the city of Pittsburgh.
