In theory there is no reason to take digital pictures in black and white, since they can always be desaturated later. In practice, knowing that the picture will never have any colors in it makes one think more in terms of lines and shadows. Here are two pictures taken with a camera from the Neolithic era of digital cameras, which Father Pitt keeps set to black-and-white mode.
Rockwell Hall was not quite finished when it was featured in an Alcoa advertisement as one of the Pittsburgh skyscrapers made possible by aluminum. The restrained modernist classicism of the building has been faithfully maintained, so that it looks just about the same now as it did when it was new.
Now, who designed the building? Father Pitt asked Google, “Who was the architect of Rockwell Hall at Duquesne University?”—and instantly got a confident answer from artificial intelligence: “The architect of Rockwell Hall at Duquesne University was Newman-Schmidt. The building, also known as the Duquesne University Building, features a student lounge, vending area, and computer labs, and connects to downtown Pittsburgh via a skywalk.”
Newman-Schmidt was a photography company that provided this excellent picture, and the rest of the information comes from the “description” at that page, which our friend with the artificial brain has confidently misinterpreted.
So we asked a human architect, who told us that “the real answer is William York Cocken (probably with others).”
It seems to old Pa Pitt that, if he has to do the research himself anyway, then AI just adds an unnecessary step that can be profitably eliminated.
Mr. Cocken died just a week before the building was dedicated, and yet none of the articles on the dedication mentioned the name of the architect. However, the building was mentioned in his obituaries in all three daily papers (for example, this one in the Press).
The star-spangled blue dome of this church is an almost startling sight rising above the streets of downtown McKeesport. The church, generally known as “St. Mary’s” by locals, was built in 1974 from a design by Sergei Padukow,1 a specialist in Russian churches who adapted very traditional Russian forms to a late-twentieth-century style.
The serviceable canopy over the side entrance replaced a much more characteristic original, as we see in this 1970s photograph.
A comparison with this illustration of “a characteristic church” in Moscow (from from John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, 1898) shows us how neatly Padukow adapted traditional Russian forms to a modern idiom.
A modernist church built in 1964 in traditional basilica form. The architect was J. Kenneth Myers. The church is dedicated to St. Nicholas of Myra, famous for giving gifts to poor children (thus inspiring our legend of Santa Claus) and for smacking Arius across the face at the Council of Nicaea. He was versatile.
It is a curious fact of our religious life that, even in the most depressed areas, the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox congregations often flourish, while the Western churches languish and evaporate one by one. This church is in a part of downtown McKeesport that can seem nearly abandoned—but not if you visit on a Sunday, when parishioners flock to St. Nicholas and the Russian Orthodox church just down the street.
The skeleton outline of an onion dome instantly conveys that this is an Eastern church.
Casimir Pellegrini Associates were the architects of this church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1963. It was a Franciscan parish until just a few years ago. Unlike some other abandoned Catholic churches, this one has a happy ending: it was bought by the thriving Lebanese Maronite Catholic congregation of Our Lady of Victory, which began in Brookline (or arguably earlier in the Lower Hill) and spent years banished to the wilds of Scott Township. In honor of Pittsburgh’s best Lebanese festival, which begins today and lasts all weekend, here are quite a few pictures of St. Pamphilus/Our Lady of Victory, which old Pa Pitt has done his best to make look like period-appropriate Kennedy-era Kodachrome slides.
The Our Lady of Victory congregation has graciously allowed St. Pamphilus to stay in his home on the front wall of the church, where he distributes bread to begging hands.
Father Pitt will admit that he does not find the nave the most attractive of all our church buildings. It is dignified and spacious, and that is enough. But the tower, a mailbox on stilts, captures his imagination, and he would hate to see anything happen to it.
The church was dedicated to St. Pamphilus, but it is St. Francis who greets you at the door with his usual motto “Pax et bonum.”
This shrine to Our Lady of Victory is now in its third location.
Father Pitt makes it a practice to try to record all the names on a war memorial, because sometimes things happen to inscriptions. If you enlarge this picture, every name should be clearly legible.
A plaque remembers Msgr. Elias P. Basil, the founding pastor of Our Lady of Victory parish. He had been pastor of St. Anne’s, the Maronite church in the Lower Hill. The story is that he promised St. Mary that, if all his parishioners came home safe from the Second World War, he would build a church in her honor. They did, and he did.
St. Anne Church was on Fulton, later Fullerton, Street, one of the Lower Hill streets that no longer exist because they were urban-renewaled to death. This cornerstone was preserved from the demolished church.
There’s something pleasingly simple about this little apartment building just off the Potomac Avenue business district in Dormont. There are almost no decorative details, but the simple pilasters that frame the front give the building enough texture to carry itself with dignity. The stone lintels over the windows on the side of the building are a clue to its history: the front is probably a later addition, replacing open balconies with extra rooms. But the matching white brick makes the change hard to detect without some concentration.
The entrance (we are able to peer into the shadows by combining three different exposures in one picture) surprises us with classical woodwork and ornamental leaded glass—another clue that this building is older than we would have thought from a glance at the front.
Ahavath Achim (“Brotherly Love”) is an independent Jewish congregation that describes itself as “traditional, but egalitarian,” meaning that women and men participate equally in traditional Hebrew services. The synagogue was founded in 1903, and the modest and tidy little building blends two styles so successfully that drivers on busy Chestnut Street probably don’t notice the blending. When you stop and look, though, you can see that the foyer is a modernist addition on an early-twentieth-century synagogue (built in 1937, according to a correspondent). The bricks are matched, however, and the sharply drawn lines of the addition seem to fit well with the early-modern rectangularity of the main building.
Built in 1908, the Minnetonka Building was designed by Frederick Scheibler, and it would be hard to imagine the impression it would have made in Edwardian Shadyside. It looks like a building thirty or forty years ahead of its time, with its simple forms and streamlined curves that look forward to the Moderne architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. But it also has details that remind us of the most up-to-the-minute ideas from those Viennese and German art magazines that we know Scheibler got his hands on.
This doorway with its Art Nouveau window and Egyptian-style tapering would have been right at home in a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.
More pictures of the Minnetonka Building.
The challenge: take a 1970s Brutalist retirement home that seemed to interrupt the neighborhood streetscape of Brookline Boulevard and re-imagine it as something bright and welcoming that would fit with the little one-off shops that make up the rest of the Boulevard. Rothschild Doyno Collaborative responded in 2011 with this design, whose muted but varied colors, large windows, and human-scaled ground floor seem at home on the street, whereas the previous incarnation of the building seemed to loom menacingly.
