Ozymandias

A once-splendid monument lies where it toppled in the Allegheny Cemetery.

Tombstone at Old St. Luke’s

This 1849 tombstone in Old St. Luke’s churchyard, Woodville, is the work of an unusually talented stonecutter. The calligraphic styles of middle-nineteenth-century penmanship have been imitated precisely in the stone.

Romantic Monument

This monument in the Victorian Romantic style is such a jumble of metaphors that old Pa Pitt is reluctant to try to untangle it. A number of elements—calla, ferns, cushion, scroll, drapery, rustic seat—are rendered individually with great realism, but thrown together in an extraordinarily unlikely way. The monument can be found (but probably won’t be found by most people) in a nearly forgotten German Lutheran cemetery on a hillside in Beechview.

Lower Gatehouse of Allegheny Cemetery

The Butler Street gatehouse was part of the original design of the cemetery in the 1840s, and it serves its function perfectly. From a busy city street we enter a romantic fantasy landscape that might have come straight from Sir Walter Scott. The contrast is almost as great as the contrast between life and afterlife.

Union Dale Cemetery

The Union Dale Cemetery was to the city of Allegheny what the Allegheny Cemetery was to the city of Pittsburgh: the place where the rich and prominent went to their final rest, taking as much of their wealth with them as possible. It occupies an even more precipitous hillside from which, through the trees, we can catch occasional glimpses of the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh. These pictures were taken with a Kiev-4A camera.