Alden & Harlow, the highest-class high-class architects in Pittsburgh, designed this mausoleum, certainly the most photographed monument in the Homewood Cemetery, for William Harry Brown. It is festooned with Egyptian-style symbols, but the pyramid itself is in the proportions of the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome.
More pictures of the Brown pyramid, and more, and more.
This pyramid, almost certainly the most-photographed mausoleum in the cemetery, was designed for William Harry Brown, banker and heir to a shipping empire, by Alden & Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects. It was built in 1898.
Like the Huhn pyramid in the Allegheny Cemetery (but on a much larger scale), this is a classical interpretation of the Egyptian pyramid, with proportions more like those of the Pyramid of Cestius along the Appian Way than like those of a true Egyptian pyramid. It is striking enough that it appears in much of the Homewood Cemetery’s publicity. It was designed by Alden & Harlow and built for William Harry Brown, banker and heir to a shipping empire, in 1898. Mr. Brown’s firm was the largest shipper of coal on the rivers, which obviously made him quite a pile of money.
A monument to Jacob Jay Vandergrift, riverboat captain, pioneering oil magnate, and eponymous founder of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania. There are an awful lot of eponymous people in the Allegheny Cemetery. The column was supposedly designed by Alden & Harlow.
The pictures in this article have been donated to Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use them for any purpose whatsoever.
