Father Pitt

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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
An Intersection in Four Mile Run

In neighborhoods like Four Mile Run, nestled in a steep ravine, some of the streets necessarily turn into stairways.

June 11, 2008
Selling Brookline

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Brookline today is a pleasant city neighborhood whose central avenue, Brookline Boulevard, is the broadest commercial street in Pittsburgh–a fact that will greatly surprise visitors from other cities, where residential streets may well be broader than Brookline Boulevard. In 1905, it was mostly vacant lots, but this advertisement promises a glowing future that–for the most part–actually came to pass. The neighborhood will enjoy even greater advantages when it is taken into the city of Pittsburgh: “the vote has been taken, the matter is officially settled.” The acrimonious annexation of Allegheny was still very much up in the air at that point, and the public would need assurance that Brookline would not present similar difficulties.

June 9, 2008
Floral Wallpaper

Rosa multiflora (it has no common name except “multiflora rose” and some nicknames too impolite to repeat here) is a noxious and invasive weed that can take over whole hillsides with its thick, rambling, thorny shoots. In June, it’s also one of our most beautiful flowers, covering itself with clusters of white roses and filling the air with rose perfume.

Here are two versions of a Rosa multiflora picture that will make a splendid desktop wallpaper for your computer. Nothing is more restful, or more conducive to productive work, than a view of green leaves and white flowers. Click to enlarge; right-click to download the full-size version.

The wide-screen version is for typical wide-screen screen resolutions of 1680 by 1050 or smaller.

The standard version is for screen resolutions of 1280 by 1024 or smaller.

June 6, 2008