Father Pitt

Tag: Sculpture

  • Art Deco Planter at County Airport

    Two Art Deco planters flank the entrance to the Allegheny County Airport terminal. They bear plaques emblematic of aviation: planes, propellers, and eagles.

  • Lion on the Allegheny County Courthouse

    Romanesque lions guard the Allegheny County Courthouse. They would originally have been at street level before Grant Street was lowered by about a storey.

  • Eagle on the Boulevard of the Allies

    Matched eagles guard the Grant Street entrance to the Boulevard of the Allies viaduct, built after World War I and named in a fit of residual patriotism.

  • Lion on the Colonial Trust Building

    Another Fourth Avenue lion ornament, on a building that was a later work of Frederick Osterling.

  • 311 and 321 First Avenue

    These two buildings are nearly identical, but differ in their decorative details. The cherubs on the pilaster capitals of number 321 are especially notable.

  • Lion on the Commercial National Bank Building

    No street in Pittsburgh, and possibly in the country, is denser with lions than Fourth Avenue. These little lions decorate the Commercial National Bank building by Alden & Harlow, one of the small but richly ornate banks that filled in the gaps between the famous bank towers.

  • Bronze Doors on the Carnegie Institute Building

    It took tons of beautifully cast bronze to make the grand entrances on the original Carnegie Institute building, as opposed to the modern entrance in the Scaife Galleries addition, which takes a bunch of glass doors ordered from a catalogue.

  • Romanesque Capital on the Music Building

    The Music Building at the University of Pittsburgh was originally a house designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow for the pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church across the street. It has been expanded for institutional use, but with some effort made to keep the expansion in sympathy with the original house.

  • The Noble Quartet

    Science, art, music, literature: these were Andrew Carnegie’s “Noble Quartet,” to which he dedicated his colossal gift to Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institute. To represent these four disciplines, Carnegie’s favorite sculptor, J. Massey Rhind, gave us Galileo, Michelangelo, Bach, and Shakespeare.

    An interesting question: would we make the same choices today? Perhaps. But if we were to change the list, old Pa Pitt might suggest John Brashear, Andy Warhol, Earl Hines, and August Wilson. Not that he has any regional prejudices.

    Galileo dwarfs that little Atlas fellow.

    Michelangelo works on a model.

    Bach thinks musical thoughts.

    Shakespeare scans a huge folio for plot ideas to pillage.

  • Art Deco Vegetation

    A decorative panel on a building on Forbes Avenue seems to capture the spirit of medieval decoration filtered through an Art Deco lens.