A Stroll through Allegheny Cemetery

A short stroll in the snow through an enchanted landscape filled with fantastic temples, angels, and cold beauties with warm hearts.

I Love You, Lillian Russell

Lillian Russell may be the most celebrated beauty in the history of the United States.

 

Her fourth and last husband was a Pittsburgh newspaperman, which earned her a mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery. On Valentine’s Day, someone left glass pebbles spelling out “I love you” in front of the door.

Dead, but Still Busy

Mr. O’Neill is possibly the only resident of the Allegheny Cemetery who is still working at a desk job post mortem. Eugene O’Neill is buried nearby, but not any Eugene O’Neill you know.

Museum as Art

The Frick Art Museum in Point Breeze was built as a home for Helen Clay Frick’s art collection. It’s a small collection, but chosen with good taste–a Boucher here, a Reynolds there, and a roomful of priceless medieval religious art. The building itself is less than forty years old, but the timeless design could easily have been a Renaissance palace.

The Mellon Fire Escape

East Liberty Presbyterian Church dominates East Liberty from every angle. It was designed by the great Ralph Adams Cram, and, per square foot, it may be the most expensive church ever built in America. Because Mellon money built it, perhaps to atone for some of the sins inevitable on the road to becoming the richest family on earth, locals call it the Mellon Fire Escape.

Imposingly Ionic

The columns of the Mellon Institute building in Oakland are supposedly the largest monolithic columns in the world. Anyone who spends time in Pittsburgh will notice a kind of local obsession with having the largest this or that in the world.

A Kaleidoscope of Glass and Iron

Looking up from under the rotunda of Penn Station, which is now converted to apartments and offices. If you want to catch a train, you have to go out back by the trash cans, where a small modern station has been grafted onto the main building.