This 1849 tombstone in Old St. Luke’s churchyard, Woodville, is the work of an unusually talented stonecutter. The calligraphic styles of middle-nineteenth-century penmanship have been imitated precisely in the stone.
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Tombstone at Old St. Luke’s
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American Fascist
A certain C. C. Ehrhardt, a name that seems familiar for some reason, writes:
Dear old Pa Pitt, please explain what you mean by American Fascist.
Father Pitt is glad to oblige.
The architecture of Hitler’s Germany (warning: the link leads to a slightly odd site) is famous, or notorious, for its grandiose scale and imitation of Roman imperial ideals. But it was part of a wider worldwide style in governmental architecture. Adapting classical forms to twentieth-century needs, the style conveyed the idea that your government is all-powerful and benevolent—but all-powerful first, benevolent a distant second. We might call the style “fascist” in the root sense of the term, the fasces being an ancient Roman symbol of authority.
When this style appears in the United States, old Pa Pitt can think of no better term for it than “American Fascist.” The most prominent example in Pittsburgh is the Federal Building on Grant Street:
Not only does this massive building strongly echo the parallel developments that would grow up in Nazi Germany, but over each entrance it even carries the very symbol of Fascism, the fasces, a bundle of rods surrounding an axe:
This is the most nakedly Fascist building in Pittsburgh, but there’s more than a little of the style on some other government buildings of the same period. The County Office Building, for example, has a strong whiff of the Fascist about it, although uniquely its architectural inspiration is not classical Roman but medieval Romanesque:
The choice of Romanesque style might seem surprising, but the urban context makes the reason clear. H. H. Richardson’s gigantic courthouse and jail sits right across the street; “Richardsonian Romanesque” became the official architectural style of Allegheny County, and even the strong current of fascism in middle-twentieth-century government architecture would have to take Richardson’s influence into account.
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Letterbox in the Frick Building
A brass letterbox in the lobby of the Frick Building downtown. Letters come down the shaft from the upper floors and into this miniature postal temple, where they are treated royally for a few hours until they have to be transferred to a humble mailbag.
UPDATE: Note the clarification from the kind commenter below, who points out that the shaft is no longer in use. What would H. C. Frick say if you told him he had to walk all the way down to the lobby to deposit his outgoing mail? (It’s a trick question: H. C. Frick would of course reply, “No, you have to walk all the way down to the lobby to deposit my outgoing mail.”)
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Alley at Twilight
A South Side alley, crammed with little houses, in the fading light of a summer evening. In dense neighborhoods like the South Side, alleys were built between the main streets to serve the rear entrances of the rowhouses; but soon the real estate became so valuable that, one by one, the property owners sold off their back yards for smaller rowhouses. Alley houses like these are especially typical of the South Side, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, and the Mexican War Streets, all of them old rowhouse neighborhoods.
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Carved Wood, Allegheny West
Carved ornaments at the base of a porch column in Allegheny West. After spending the better part of their lives slightly ashamed of their decorative elements, the Victorian houses in Allegheny West once again show them off with bright contrasting paint schemes.
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Federal Deco
The Federal Reserve Bank on Grant Street is actually one of our purest Art Deco buildings. It’s a Moderne interpretation of the style old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist.
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Butterfly
A fritillary enjoys the almost overpoweringly sweet nectar of a Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) that grew at the edge of the woods in Mount Lebanon.
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Romantic Monument
This monument in the Victorian Romantic style is such a jumble of metaphors that old Pa Pitt is reluctant to try to untangle it. A number of elements—calla, ferns, cushion, scroll, drapery, rustic seat—are rendered individually with great realism, but thrown together in an extraordinarily unlikely way. The monument can be found (but probably won’t be found by most people) in a nearly forgotten German Lutheran cemetery on a hillside in Beechview.
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Washington and Guyasuta
With one of the grandest views in North America spread out before them, real-estate magnate George Washington and Chief Guyasuta discuss their plans for the construction of Heinz Field. The sculpture, a bronze by James A. West, is called “Points of View.” Father Pitt suspects the title may be a pun of some sort.
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Belgian Block on the South Side
Belgian block is a pavement made of brick-shaped stones, more or less uniform, but usually rather less than more. Pittsburghers call it “cobblestone,” having lost the memory of what real cobblestones are like. (A real cobblestone is an irregular smooth, round stone, and cobblestone pavements are quite a bit bumpier than Belgian-block pavements.) Countless Belgian-block pavements still exist in Pittsburgh, and often preparations for repaving an asphalt street reveal the Belgian blocks beneath, still perfectly intact, as they will be when archaeologists dig them up a thousand years from now.
This pavement is on an industrial street near the river on the South Side. Old Pa Pitt admits to not knowing the purpose of what appear to be iron spikes in a more or less straight line.
