The Eberhardt and Ober brewery in Dutchtown was a Pittsburgh institution. Its beer was affectionately known as E & O—for “Early & Often,” as the advertisements put it. Mr. Eberhardt and Mr. Ober now rest side by side in the Allegheny Cemetery in matching but not identical mausoleums.
If you simply can’t settle for less, why not rest eternally in a replica of one of the world’s most famous monuments? These impressive memorials are in the Allegheny Cemetery.
In the nineteenth century, churches usually built their cemeteries outside the city. At the turn of the twentieth, when the rapidly expanding streetcar lines triggered a storm of new development all around Pittsburgh, many of those cemeteries ended up surrounded by crowded urban neighborhoods. This one in Beechview is not quite forgotten; someone comes to mow it two or three times a year, but much of it is so overgrown by now that it’s immune to the mower.
Pittsburgh’s earliest settlers are buried downtown in the churchyard of Trinity Cathedral, the Episcopal cathedral of Pittsburgh (or at least the cathedral of some Anglican diocese, though which one may be up in the air right now). Next door is First Presbyterian, another colonial-era congregation, and across the street is the Duquesne Club, forming a perfect triangle of old money.
Trinity Churchyard is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.
Like a forgotten Khmer temple rising out of the jungle, this octagonal mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery is partly overgrown, sprouting small trees from its roof. The black-and-white pictures were taken with an old Agfa Isolette, the color picture with a Yashica-A TLR.
More and larger pictures are here.
