This phone-camera picture is soupy with noise reduction if you enlarge it, but it gives us a good idea of how the Flash Gordon glass-block window in the stairwell looks at night.
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Tribute to Andy Warhol
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens. The grave of Andy Warhol, with the usual offerings, in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, Bethel Park. In the background a gravedigger is finishing a fresh grave.
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The Negley, Shadyside
The Negley was probably built in about 1909; the architects were the firm of Janssen & Abbott. Some of the original details have vanished over the years, but Benno Janssen’s spare version of Georgian style still leaves an impression of dignity and elegance.
An unusual choice: the doorway frames are cast iron.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. -
Pentecostal Tabernacle, West Park
A simple little Gothic church; it now belongs to Mancini’s bakery across Mancini Way.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. -
The Queen Anne Style in Coraopolis
The “Queen Anne” style is the one people think of most often when they think of Victorian houses. It had very little to do with any queen named Anne. Its defining characteristic is a concern for variety and picturesqueness: there is always a surprise lurking around the corner of a Queen Anne house. Turrets and Dutch gables and curiously shaped dormers and fits of Renaissance detailing are favorite devices of Queen Anne architects, but there is no single thing that defines the style.
Coraopolis has an exceptionally fine collection of Queen Anne houses, and some of them preserve exquisite details usually lost to the ravages of time. Enlarge the picture above, for example, and admire the original windows.
This one has had many revisions over the years, but the irregular shape of a Queen Anne house, and the dominant turret, are still there to mark the style.
Here is a house that has kept many elegant details, including its slate roof and wood trim. And note the windows in the turret:
The glass curves to match the curve of the wall.
A curious dormer with remarkable tracery in the window.
Another house with some alterations, but they do not disguise the turret and the big rounded bay in front.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. This house has also been through some alterations: the porch might have wrapped all the way around to include both doors, and the vertical siding on the second-floor oriel doubtless replaced wood shingles. The shingles are still there on the third-floor gables, however.
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Coleus
Coleus scutellarioides is that plant with the brightly colored leaves you see planted wherever a shady patch needs brightening up. The number and variety of cultivars will make your head spin, but here we present a manageable five from gardens in Shadyside and from Phipps Conservatory.
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Kenmont Avenue, Mount Lebanon
The whole length of Kenmont Avenue is included in the Mount Lebanon Historic District. The southern half of the street has some charming cottages from the 1920s or so, and as a bonus one of the oldest houses in Mount Lebanon.
This is the old house: the Dr. Joseph McCormick house, built before the Civil War, as the hand-lettered plaque from the Mount Lebanon Historical Society tells us.
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Modern Cafe, Allegheny West
The Modern Cafe is a startling outbreak of almost cartoonish modernism in Allegheny West, as if the owners had decided on a name for the place first and then designed a building to go with the name. Its neon sign is one of our chief cultural treasures.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Sewickley United Methodist Church
The most striking feature (in two senses of the word “striking”) of this church is the great clock tower, which gives time to the whole village. In fact, the borough took over responsibility for maintaining the clock, as the church tells us in its page of Village Clock Tower Facts. The tower was finished in 1884, and in 1996 a thorough rebuilding was finished that included a new electronic clock to replace the replacement clock that had replaced the original clock many decades previously.
