Frank Vittor was the sculptor of this memorial, in which Victory is striding forward with a laurel crown to honor the people of Braddock who served in the First World War. It was installed in front of the Braddock library in 1923, and from this angle it looks almost brand new.
The base of the monument had six bronze panels with the names of all who served, including this dedication panel with the names of the dead.
These pictures are very large, so all the names will be legible if you enlarge the photograph.
We suppose the names between Hurley and Marx were melted down into cheap booze. Old Pa Pitt has always wondered what scrap-metal dealers think when a man in a battered pickup truck rolls up with a big chunk of names in bronze. Apparently they think, “Well, he certainly must have come by this honestly.”
Colonel James Anderson was the kind gentleman who opened his personal library to working boys on Saturday afternoons at his house in Manchester. One of those boys was Andrew Carnegie, who never forgot; and if you had mentioned Carnegie as the founder of free libraries in western Pennsylvania, Mr. Carnegie himself would have corrected you: “No, that was Colonel Anderson.”
Carnegie himself commissioned this monument to go with his library in Allegheny, because, as he said, “when fortune smiled upon me, one of my first duties was the erection of a monument to my benefactor.” For the sculptor he chose the best: Daniel Chester French, who was already famous for the Minute Man in Concord (Massachusetts), and would later contribute the colossus of Lincoln in the Lincoln memorial. The architectural parts of the monument were designed by Henry Bacon, who would later design the Lincoln Memorial itself. The monument we see today is a duplicate: the sculptures are original, but the original base was destroyed along with the rest of the center of old Allegheny when urban renewal came to Allegheny Center. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation succeeded in raising money to rebuild the base as Bacon designed it.
The monument shows the same approach to honoring a distinguished citizen that French would later take in the Westinghouse Memorial. Instead of an impressive statue of the subject, French represents his accomplishments in bronze. Here the bust of Colonel Anderson sits on top of the monument, but the main subject is a a young blacksmith’s apprentice who has paused in his work and is sitting on his anvil, absorbed in a book. That pause from manual labor to enter the realm of literature was what Colonel Anderson made possible.
Here is the artist’s mark in the bronze: “DANIEL C. FRENCH Sc.” (for “Sculpsit”) “1903.”
A bronze plaque duplicates the original inscription. Pedantic instincts force old Pa Pitt to point out that placing the whole inscription in quotation marks was unnecessary; but if it had to be done, the quotation marks around “working boys” should have been single.
When the new Post Office and Federal Building was designed in 1889 (it opened in 1892), the sculptor Eugenio Pedon, who had the franchise for decorating federal buildings, contributed two identical groups of allegorical statues to go over the entrances: Navigation, Enlightenment, and Industry. When the building came down in 1966, the groups were rescued and split up. One set of Navigation and Enlightenment ended up here at Allegheny Center, where they’re known as the Stone Maidens.
The old Post Office and Federal Building. If you enlarge the picture, you can see the Pedon statues above the entrance at the fourth-floor level.
Navigation. If the faces and bodies seem disproportionately elongated, remember that we are meant to be looking up at them from far down in the street; the sculptor adjusted his perspective accordingly.
Enlightenment. The twin statue of Enlightenment ended up at the corner of a Rite Aid parking lot on Mount Washington. Below we see her trying to hold back the clouds of darkness, which goes as well for her as it always does.
Edward Ludwig Albert Pausch was the sculptor of this monument, which Wikipedia tells us is his most ambitious work. It is meant to show Washington at the age of 23, when he was failing to keep the French out of Pittsburgh—although since Pausch modeled the face on the Houdon bust sculpted in 1785, our young colonel looks a bit old and weary for a 23-year-old.
As equestrian statues go, this one is not Father Pitt’s favorite. It is probably a very good one, but it strikes old Pa Pitt as stiffly posed. The pile of vegetative debris that holds the horse up by the stomach does not help; it makes George look like he’s posing on a carousel pony. Most equestrian statues stand on their own four legs—but then most are made of bronze. This one is in granite.
The monument was given by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, a fraternal order for people who could prove they weren’t Catholic. The Jr. O. U. A. M. was a big deal a century or so ago, and the local group’s splendid building in Oakland still stands at 3400 Forbes Avenue.
We have seen this statue before, on the war memorial in Coraopolis. Here the doughboy is missing his bayonet, but otherwise the statue is identical, doubtless cast from the same mold. The three-sided base carries the township honor roll in bronze; and, following his usual practice, Father Pitt records all the names in high enough resolution to be easily legible.
The soldier and the sailor who guard the entrance to Soldiers and Sailors Hall, by sculptor Frederick Hibbard. They were installed in 1923, one hundred years ago.
Charles Keck was a very successful sculptor who had a fruitful relationship with the architect Henry Hornbostel. He decorated the City-County Building, Pennsylvania Hall at Pitt, the Education Building in Albany, and the City Hall in that other Oakland, the one in California, all of them buildings by Hornbostel. He was a natural choice for this allegorical sculpture over the entrance to Soldiers and Sailors Hall, whose message seems to be that America is always ready, so don’t mess with her.
Note the large eyes. They may be inspired by late-antique sculpture, in which the eyes are usually disproportionately big. In a sculpture meant to be seen from a distance, the disproportion is not obvious at normal viewing range, but the large eyes give expression to the face that it would not have if they were natural size.
John Massey Rhind, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite sculptor, decorated the Carnegie Institute building with bronzes representing the Noble Quartet—science, art, music, and literature—to which the Institute was dedicated. At street level, each member of the quartet is represented by a portrait of one of its famous representatives. Above each statue, on the roof, is an allegorical group of female figures representing the abstract ideal. We have seen the pictures of the statues before, but since old Pa Pitt just recently took pictures of the allegorical groups, he thought it might be interesting to see everything together at once.
