Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Bronze

  • Haas Mausoleum, St. Michael’s Cemetery

    Haas mausoleum

    An attractive Art Deco design with more traditionally Gothic bronze doors that have survived because this mausoleum is right at the cemetery entrance, where people might tend to notice two men with a pickup truck fiddling with a mausoleum in the middle of the night. (Note the fence spike in the foreground: old Pa Pitt apologizes for that, but it’s sometimes hard to see what’s in the picture when the camera has to be held above a fence.) This is one of only two mausoleums in St. Michael’s Cemetery, and it is the grander of the two.

    Stained glass of the Holy Family

    The stained-glass window of the Holy Family is a very good one, though it was probably a standard catalogue item.

    Angel in bronze

    Angels adorn the bronze doors.

    Bronze decorations
    Corner view

  • Laughlin Tombstones, Allegheny Cemetery

    Laughlin tombstones, Allegheny Cemetery

    There was a brief revival of early-nineteenth-century tombstone styles in the 1920s and 1930s, and it produced some very attractive designs. Several of them are in the Laughlin plot. The three above share a weeping-willow design patterned after folk-art tombstones of a hundred years earlier.

    Alice Denniston Laughlin
    James B. Laughlin
    Clara Young Laughlin
    Anne Irwin Laughlin

    This later tombstone is made in the same shape as the others, but with a different decorative scheme.

    Henry A. Laughlin

    In the same plot are some stones with bronze plaques commemorating Henry B. Laughlin and his two wives.

    Alice B. Denniston Laughlin
    Mary B. Reed Laughlin

  • Porter Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

    Porter monument

    This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site (in an article that has since disappeared) was vague and confusing on dates. It said that the bronze angel was cast “after 1910” as a replica of an original granite sculpture. The earliest dated Putnam work listed in her sparse Wikipedia article is from 1917. Brenda Putnam would have been twenty years old in 1910; she would thus have been a teenager when the granite version was done, if the date “1910” means anything at all. Henry Kirke Porter, identified as “the best-known Porter here” by the cemetery’s site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.

    If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would imagine that those glorious wings were too heavy for granite, and the bronze cast was made when the original sculpture proved unstable.

    Angel by Brenda Putnam
    Closer to the angel
    Face of the angel

  • Worthington Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    Worthington mausoleum

    Classicism pared down to the bones, severely elegant. The bronze doors are especially fine.

    Bronze doors
    Worthington mausoleum

  • A. J. Sunstein Mausoleum, West View Cemetery

    A. J. Sunstein Mausoleum

    Considering that the Exodus is the central event in Israel’s sacred history, Egyptian Revival has always struck old Pa Pitt as an odd choice of styles for a Jewish cemetery. But with this particular mausoleum he can see the appeal. “You think you’re a god-king, Pharaoh? Well, how would you like to be a door handle for the rest of eternity? What do you think of that, Mr. Bricks-Without-Straw?”

    Bronze door handle with Pharaoh heads