Father Pitt

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The William Penn Hotel

Henry Clay Frick specified that the William Penn should be the best hotel in America, so the best hotel was what he got. The building itself is notable for its restrained elegance; inside, it was the first hotel in the United States with a private bath in every room. At first glance it seems almost severely plain, but step back a block or so and the harmony of the proportions becomes more obvious. The ornament, too, is neither lavish nor gaudy, but simply in the very best taste. Nearly a century after it was built, the William Penn remains Pittsburgh’s most famous and most elegant hotel.

August 27, 2008
The Vanishing Black Stones of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh used to be a city of massive black stone buildings. In a few years, perhaps, they will all have disappeared–not torn down, but cleaned of the soot deposits from decades of heavy industry. When the mills died and the cleanings began, it came as a surprise to many Pittsburghers that the uniquely Pittsburghish black stones they had known all their lives were, underneath it all, quite pale and ordinary-looking, almost like the stones in every other city. Experts say that the pollutants eat away at the stones, so I suppose the cleanings are necessary; but I miss those black stones. Albright Community United Methodist Church on Centre Avenue in Shadyside has not been cleaned yet; this is its tower, still gloriously black, though not as inky black as it was at the peak of the steel industry.

August 18, 2008
Richardsonian Romanesque

First United Methodist Church sits where Shadyside, East Liberty, Friendship, and Bloomfield all meet. It would be hard for a building to get much more Richardsonian without having been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson himself.

August 17, 2008
A Short Stroll Up Liberty Avenue

Just a quick walk up one block of Liberty Avenue, from the Wood Street subway station to the EBA busway stop.

Downtown Pittsburgh is built on a tiny triangle of land at the junction of two rivers. In the latter 1700s, when the town was laid out, rational town planning was very fashionable, and the grid was the ideal. The only way to lay a grid in a triangle, however, was to make it two colliding grids at different angles, and Liberty Avenue is where the collision occurs. The southeastern side of Liberty Avenue is lined with buildings in all sorts of odd shapes, especially triangles.

Here are two classic Victorian commercial buildings, one updated with a bit of postmodernist frippery on top. Would you care to buy it? It certainly has a lot of natural light from those windows.

August 16, 2008
Wood-Block Pavement in Shadyside

Roslyn Place is a tiny and impossibly narrow street lined with small but dignified brick townhouses. So far it is little different from any of a dozen other nearby townhouse plans of the early 1900s. But it is the street itself, rather than the houses that line it, that is the attraction.

Those are not bricks that pave the street; they’re wood blocks. Here’s a closer look:

A somewhat bedraggled plaque on the handsome wrought-iron fence along Ellsworth Avenue dates the pavement to the year 1914.

August 16, 2008
Robert Burns Fans: Here’s Your Wallpaper

Andrew Carnegie and a number of other wealthy poetry-lovers gave us this statue of Robert Burns, which stands in Schenley Park on the grounds of Phipps Conservatory, just at the end of the Panther Hollow Bridge. So I’ve made it into a perfect computer wallpaper for Burns fans everywhere. The wallpaper comes in three different proportions; click on each image for the full-scale version.

The 1600 x 1200 version can be rescaled to fit 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, 640 x 480, or any other 4-to-3 display.

The 1680 x 1060 version can be scaled to fit widescreen displays.

The 1280 x 1024 version fits most last-generation CRT monitors at their highest resolution.

July 27, 2008
A Kodak Pony and a Perfect Day

The Kodak Pony is a delightful camera. It’s cheap and rugged, but it takes very good pictures with its sharp Ektanar lens, and it leaves the photographer completely in control of the picture. It’s hard for today’s photographers to imagine how little automation you can get away with. Here’s what you do to take a picture with a Pony: Set the aperture (there’s no light meter, of course); set the shutter speed; set the focus (no rangefinder, so you have to estimate the distance); cock the shutter; push the shutter release; release the film lock; and wind for the next picture.

So part of the reason I love the Pony is because I get to do everything myself. For the remainder of my argument, i offer these two pictures, taken yesterday on the grounds of Phipps Conservatory, and both showing the Cathedral of Learning in the distance.

July 25, 2008
Before We Get That Subway…

An editorial cartoon by Jamieson of the Dispatch from 1906, when the need for a subway in Pittsburgh was already obvious and urgent. The subway downtown opened in 1985, seventy-nine years later.

June 23, 2008
Aspiration

A smokestack reaches for the sky from the Carnegie Institute heating plant. The picture is teeming with metaphorical possibilities, none of which will be elaborated here.

June 19, 2008
Dolphin Fountain

A classical dolphin in a long-dry fountain at the entrance to Grandview Park, on the edge of the cliff at Mount Washington.

June 14, 2008