Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Romanesque Architecture

  • Dupey Mausoleum, Allegheny Cemetery

    Dupey mausoleum

    A small and simple rustic Romanesque mausoleum that still bears its decades of accumulated industrial blackness.

    Dupey mausoleum

  • McKeown Mausoleum, Calvary Cemetery

    McKeown mausoleum

    A Romanesque cube with an unusual apse in the back. The decorations in relief are particularly fine. The effect would have been better with bronze doors, but bronze doors tend to go missing, and their place has been taken by concrete.

    Blind arch
    McKeown moausolem

  • Shaw Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Yet another mausoleum in this cemetery whose style is hard to define; we shall call it Romanesque, because of the rusticated stone, the medieval columns, and the divided arch in the bronze doors. The huge urn on top is almost cartoonish. Two bronze ornaments flanking the inscription have been stolen, probably to be melted down for their trivial worth in metal.

    The earliest interment listed here was in 1896, and the most recent in 2001.

  • Hartman Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Another unusual design from this cemetery. We shall call the style Romanesque because of the prominent round arch and the rusticated stone, but once again the architect has refused to meet our expectations of the Romanesque in the details. You will find nothing quite like it in the Pittsburgh city cemeteries. According to cemetery records, this mausoleum received its first burial in 1883—a few years before the Allegheny County Courthouse opened the floodgates of the Romanesque revival in the Pittsburgh area.

  • Guthrie Mausoleum, McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery

    Here is a mausoleum not quite like anything else Father Pitt has seen in this area. For lack of a better term, he will call the style Romanesque, but there are odd bits of whimsy that suggest a local architect who cared little for any main stream of architectural thought.

    Many of the mausoleums in the McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery are half-sunk into the hillside—a style that had gone out of favor in most Pittsburgh cemeteries, but remained popular here well into the twentieth century, probably because the vertical landscape nearly demands it.