Yesterday I went to a PHLF-sponsored lecture/tour of the stained glass and architecture of East Liberty Presbyterian Church. It was disappointingly boring, which was frustrating since it wouldn’t have taken much to make it fascinating, but that’s beside the point, really. Most of the blow-by-blow “and in 1867 he moved back to Scotland where he married, blah blah blah” type details of the lecture I ignored completely, but one very simple and probably well-known fact that really struck me is that the present church building was in fact the fifth church built on that site in the course of about 100 years. And there wasn’t much wrong with the 4th building, either — not like the previous structures burned down or anything. They just wanted a bigger building, so they demolished the old church and built this:
It’s a really amazing building — a little city unto itself, with countless meeting rooms and classrooms and nooks-of-contemplation and a basketball court (seriously!) and a few courtyards (one with a playground for their nursery school), in addition to an enormous sanctuary space and a few chapels. And it’s all built of solid masonry with careful attention to detail in copious wood and stone carvings, stained glass, etc., etc. I’d never been in the sanctuary or chapel spaces before — we even got to climb the bell tower, which was fun — and boring lecture aside, the tour was definitely worth the time. I wouldn’t say that the stained glass is really my taste (very conservative, iconographic, trying to be medieval but with 1920′s and 1930′s sensibility), but it’s excellently well done nevertheless.
But I kept pondering the fact that the building was commissioned to take the place of a perfectly serviceable other building on the same site, and that no expense was spared in the design and construction of the thing — Mr. Mellon paid for it all, and wanted the finished church to be as impressive as possible.
Who would do that today? Even the wealthiest of congregations would never be able to afford to build such a thing, let alone tear down an existing building to do it — and you don’t see the Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets and George Soroses of the world sinking their cash into neo-gothic masterpieces. I think about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, which has been muddling along in its ambitious gothic self-actualization for over a hundred years, and it’s only half completed now. Heck, many of the great actually-Gothic cathedrals in Europe took several generations to complete. But East Liberty Pres was built in just four years (1931-1935).
The significance of which four years those were didn’t really occur to me until this morning, when Zen and I walked out for our morning constitutional and passed the PDPW tractor on its way to mow Oakland Square. In answer to Zen’s “de dah?” I said automatically, “That’s a tractor, baby – the city tractor is coming to cut the grass on the square.” We watched it mosey past at its grandmotherly pace of 10 mph and I thought, jesus, the city sends that thing here through city streets from over a mile away once a week — what’s the carbon footprint of keeping the square mowed? Couldn’t we just get some goats or something?
In India I remember being struck the first time I saw tiny city grass plots being mowed by small teams of men using a buffalo and a long rotary mower. In India, of course, labor is extremely cheap — disconcertingly so — and furthermore the government seems to make it a priority to employ as many people as possible, so seeing 3 or 4 guys doing a job that one American would do among a dozen other responsibilities was hardly uncommon for me. I once spent half an hour watching a fireline of maybe two dozen women in bright saris pour concrete for a high-rise in Madras — the concrete was mixed by hand on the ground, then hoisted by the bucketful on a rope pulley up to the top of the building (8 storeys? 10?), where it was added to a hopper and then doled out by the platterful to these women who would scoop the platters of concrete up onto their heads and walk over to the spot on the opposite side of the roof where the concrete was to be laid, dumping their platters and walking back to the hopper. Their neck muscles must have been impressive.
But the point is that human labor there is much cheaper than machinery or the costs of operating and maintaining machinery. A stone crusher costs money, and then it runs on gas which also costs money — whereas a team of dalits wearing dhotis breaking rocks with hammers and sifting gravel through different grades of mesh is dirt cheap.
And as I mused on this I was reminded of a remark that my stained glass instructor Catherine made, the first time I took her class in restoration at the Union Project: because the UP’s windows were built when labor was much cheaper relative to the cost of the glass, the builders couldn’t afford to be choosy about what glass was too difficult to work with — so they’d spend lots of time widening came channels and working the lead to fit around uneven butt-ends of glass in many cases, whereas today one would probably just discard such end-bits to save the labor.
And then this reminded me of when East Liberty Pres was built — the height of the Great Depression. Sure, Mr. Mellon could afford an army of wood carvers and stone masons and glaziers and engineers to work like bees, and probably they were all really happy to have the work.
Since Zen and I were well on our walk at that point, and I was already musing on this blog post, I decided to detour by way of Heinz Chapel (built 1933-1938) to try and get some pictures of the kinds of effort involved in making crap glass work in a window. It’s a little hard to photograph stained glass on a sunny day, and I only had my iphone camera, so the pics aren’t very clear; but here’s the base of one of the north transept windows –
and here are some details of that bottom panel:
I guess it’s still hard to tell. Take it from me — it’s some crap glass. Bottle-thick on one side and chip-thin on the other, in many cases — and the preponderance of itty bitty painted pieces is really impressive. Virtually every piece has been painted. Insanely labor-intensive. I hope Pitt employs a team of glaziers to come re-cement the windows every 15 years or so, because they’d really take a hit if they had to pay to have them re-leaded.
On the walk over to the chapel Zen and I passed several other excellent examples of labor-saving devices that are just hell on the natural resources — a Pitt sprinkler that only managed to get about 30% of its water onto the plants it was showering, the rest washing the sidewalk for several feet around was one, but I didn’t get a picture. We paused in front of the panther fountain at the Cathedral of Learning to watch the water (Z loves fountains)…
… and I couldn’t help but notice that the pavement all around the fountain was sopping wet:
(can’t see it there? try here:)
– another example of groundskeepers watering the sidewalk. I even watched the guy coil up his hose. Why should they have to water the flowers around the fountain, when the water is pouring down right next to the flowers 24 hours a day? Couldn’t there be some kind of drip-irrigation or sponge that would let the flowers drink from the pool?
All of this — the lawn mowers, the sprinklers, the craftsmanship of the 1930s — is just adding to the grist I’ve been tumbling around in my brain about the coming end of civilization (as Kunstler would have it): the end of oil. Abby and Natalia and Janis and I went door-knocking for a Democrat in Moon Township on Saturday, and all of us were a little creeped out by the suburbanity of the neighborhoods we were working in (cul-de-sacs and long windy streets, obvious ordinances about lawn maintenance and so forth — but at least there were sidewalks!) and we mused about this on the ride back to the city. What’s going to become of places like that once no one can afford to drive, or to run the many devices that save labor but waste resources? Heck, what’s going to become of the city’s public works department, or the grass on Oakland Square?
I really think we should be getting some goats.
(that pic was taken at the MD Sheep & Wool Festival — and this reminds me, I need to be getting organized about Rhinebeck. Anyone want to join me?)