The Sarah Heinz House was a settlement house built in 1915 by H. J. Heinz in memory of his wife Sarah. The idea of a settlement house was that it would become a center of cultural uplift in a poor neighborhood: educated people would settle in the neighborhood and bring educational and recreational opportunities to the people around them. This is one of the few such institutions still operating: the Sarah Heinz House is still doing good work today, and still in the same building. The architect was R. Maurice Trimble, and if you compare this building to the Allegheny YMCA and the First U. P. Community House, you will see that Mr. Trimble had a very distinct idea of what a public building should look like. Of all his large buildings, this may be old Pa Pitt’s favorite.

These pictures were taken from quite a long distance: we stood at the base of Troy Hill across the street from the Eberhardt & Ober brewery in order to get a good view of the whole building. The Kodak Z990 camera has a lens that extends to the equivalent of 840mm in full-frame terms, so we could even pick out the terra-cotta eagle at the top of the building (the picture below is uncropped, by the way). This is about the practical distance limit for photography on most days: the intervening atmosphere softens the details enough that contrast had to be boosted quite a bit, which introduces more grain to an already grainy sensor. But for most purposes the picture is quite usable.