More Indoor Glories

 This is the interior of St. Paul Roman Catholic Cathedral in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  As many times as I've driven or walked past it, I'd never ventured inside until just a few days ago.  Of course, churches are best in the daylight--especially if there's a lot of intricate stained glass.  But the Cathedral of St. Paul is lovely even after dark.

 I frequently attend the Pittsburgh Renaissance and Baroque Society's performances in the cathedral's "Synod Hall."  It's a great space, too...faded, austere, and faintly medieval.  But the cathedral is magnificent.  This strange side chapel seems to be dedicated to St. Joan of Arc.  In all my church snooping, I've never before seen a chapel in her honor.  I wonder what its story might be.  Click on the picture to see the oversized statue of the warrior saint in prayer.

Many Catholic churches in this region tend toward kitsch: overly pious-looking statues of saints in pastel colors; murals depicting androgynous saints in fantastic poses, making unnatural gestures with their hands.  Though it's definitely bad manners to mock a church for its piety, the religious showiness of the murals and statues often strikes me as contrived.  (I don't tend to trust displays of emotion.)  But St. Paul doesn't succumb to those hackneyed notions of religiosity.  It has the two features that I find most important in sacred architecture: airiness and clear light.

Indoor Glories

 It's not that I stop hiking in the winter.  It's just that my life gets crazy busy, busier than most, at Christmastime.  It has to do with the line of work I'm in.  One of the [few] advantages to living in an urban area is that there are indoor glories to visit when all the free time you get is a few stolen hours here and there, and not enough time to immerse yourself in a sylvan trek.  This is the foyer of the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh.  It's attached to our big museum complex and appeared in the movie "Flashdance."

A day alone at the museums is always nice, even if it's not a real substitute for the forest.  It was especially cool to see the Hall of Sculpture entirely devoid of lame traveling exhibits and elementary school groups.  This is the kind of room where you could spend a long moment.

 One thing to love about Pittsburgh is that its florid, old fashioned architectural details are similar to a forest.  There are always things of beauty waiting to catch the eye.  Most people never notice them.  Just look at the rich detail in this marble door frame.  It's inlaid with a thistle pattern, no doubt to represent the Scottish heritage of the city's wealthiest and most philanthropic families, like the long-ago Carnegies, and Mellons, and Fricks, and Beattys.

 Of course, philanthropy is very often a thinly-disguised attempt to repurchase one's own conscience (and perhaps soul) for ruthless and selfish business practices.  The steel mills used to publish their lists of dead workers every week.  These glories are constructed on their graves, figuratively.  Isn't that always the case with human-made glory?   Versailles.  The pyramids.  The cathedrals of Europe.  All of these are mortared with the blood of the poor.  Ah, but just look at the lovely tiling on this floor.  What kind of a geometrist came up with this design, hacked out of pure marble? 

This room looked a lot different in the 1970s, when I was a kid.  It used to have faded watery-colored murals of oceanic scenes from the earliest prehistory of the earth.  Scared the living hell out of me.  Sometimes I'm glad to be back in Pittsburgh.  It's nice to be in a place where some of my earliest memories were formed.  I'm glad to have lived out West, and in suburban New York City, and half a decade in Africa.  I feel like an old Englishman who lived his life in the far-off, exotic reaches of the Empire, only to return to a little brick rowhouse in the Midlands, settling into his memories and tea at 4:00.  (Okay, the analogy breaks down with the Midlands, and the rowhouse, and the tea, but you get the drift...)