The interior of Henry Hornbostel’s City-County Building is designed on the model of a Roman basilica. It’s an excellent example of architecture as message, conveying the idea that your local government, powerful and benevolent, is at your service. It’s also a very practical interior, with the large central hall making it easy to cover the short distances between the most important departments of government. That’s a very good thing, because everyone knows that any dealing with city or county government will inevitably involve visits to at least three separate offices.

Phipps Conservatory is open Friday evenings until 10 p.m. The darkness and the relatively few visitors can sometimes give one the eerie sensation of being lost in a jungle filled with surrealistic Fräbel glass art.

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This dashing young fellow is William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham and your humble servant, as he is represented in the City-County Building.

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Late-afternoon sun catches a Route 42C train headed inbound across Dagmar Avenue on the Fallowfield Viaduct in Beechview. In rush hour, two-car trains run on all routes except 52. Route 42C will soon be the Red Line, according to the Transit Development Plan

Construction can reveal previously impossible views. Here we see the whole CNG tower from top to bottom, a 1980s postmodernist palace that presents radically different—but still harmonious—faces from different angles.

The elevator doors in the City-County Building give us an allegorical history of the growth of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County and their civic buildings, ending with the current courthouse and the City-County Building itself.

Looking up at Fifth Avenue Place from the intersection of Forbes and Stanwix.

Father Pitt found time for a few last pictures of Gateway Center just hours before the station closed forever. In two years or so, we’ll have a big new station, but old Pa Pitt will still secretly miss the little old one just a bit.

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“Pittsburgh Recollections,” installed when the Gateway Center station opened in the middle 1980s, takes us from canoes down the Allegheny to these marvelous modern mainframe computers with their gigantic reel-to-reel tape drives full of data, by way of the French and Indian War, Conestoga wagons, the riverboat era, a banjo that doubtless accompanied songs by Stephen Foster, and the age of steel. The Port Authority is raising money to have the mural restored and reinstalled at the new Gateway Center station.

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Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

What better way to remember all the saints than with a few of Father Pitt’s favorite cemetery pictures?

The Becker memorial in an old German cemetery in Beechview.

A model of the Pantheon, at only slightly reduced scale, in the Allegheny Cemetery.

An octagonal Gothic mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery.

A row of tombstones in the Allegheny Cemetery takes on an air of mystery, thanks to a seventy-year-old lens.

The door of the Winter mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery shows Mr. Winter as an Egyptian pharaoh about to depart for his journey to the underworld.