Abandoned Pittsburgh captures the city’s ruins
Seats are still in place in the abandoned Connelley Technical Institute and Adult Learning Center in Pittsburgh
A statue of the Virgin Mary stands outside St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Troy Hill, one of the first sites Abandoned Pittsburgh photographer Chuck Beard visited.
Graffiti adorns one of the walls in the former Overholt Distillery in Connellsville.
Chuck Beard, a ruins photographer who has snapped photos of crumbling structures in the Pittsburgh region, such as churches and factories, stands in his Abandoned Pittsburgh gallery in Homestead, which is located in a former police station.
HOMESTEAD – Some people would look at the abandoned Sts. Peter and Paul Church in East Liberty and see a ruin.
A house of worship that hasn’t been used in a quarter-century. A sorrowful reminder of a community’s decline. Evidence of a crisis in organized religion. A consequence of deindustrialization. Urban blight that repels reinvestment and renewal.
When Chuck Beard sees Sts. Peter and Paul Church, he sees something else entirely – he sees art.
“I just find things that are perfect don’t photograph so well,” said Beard.
A 51-year-old Florida native and an art director for Pittsburgh Magazine, Beard has engaged in a high-profile sideline as a photographer of Pittsburgh’s abandoned locations. While Sts. Peter and Paul Church has so far eluded him, he has taken photographs of locations in Pittsburgh that have long been bolted shut but still stand and still retain striking beauty and architectural grandeur – crumbling factories, forsaken hotels, churches long desacralized. Even as Pittsburgh piles up laurels as a city on the rebound and a hub for education and medicine, the city and the communities that surround it still hold plenty of deteriorating reminders of the days when it was an industrial goliath, an immigrant crossroads and a hotbed of mom-and-pop shops.
Beard has turned this fascination with the forlorn sites 21st century Pittsburgh has left behind into Abandoned Pittsburgh, a gallery he maintains, appropriately enough, in a former police station in Homestead, just a couple of blocks from the bustle and commercial sheen of the Waterfront complex. Along with the gallery, which is open from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, and 12:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturdays, Beard also has assembled three books of his work and is selling prints, gift cards, mugs and soap. He also is a regular at art shows around the region, including A Fair in the Park, which is happening today until 5 p.m. in Mellon Park, Shadyside.
Beard’s photographic work focuses on Pittsburgh, but it is part of a larger trend of “ruins photography” or, perhaps more caustically, “ruin porn.” Though Beard has few if any competitors in Pittsburgh, other cities – particularly those in the Rust Belt – have become strongholds of ruins photography. Detroit, in particular, with its multitude of disused structures, is a favorite of photographers who seek to capture the poignance and stillness of places that were once alive with activity but are now left to decay.
And ruins photography has its critics. They say the photos don’t speak to the social and economic forces that led the sites to be abandoned in the first place, whether it’s white flight, poverty or the relocation of industries to other countries. According to its detractors, ruins photography is also exploitative, a plaything of white, urban hipsters who don’t place people in the images, and doesn’t truly represent the cities where the ruins are situated.
Meanwhile, other critics say ruins photography follows a long tradition of people being fascinated by ruins, whether it’s the remains of the Roman Empire that are still standing in parts of Europe, ancient, crumbling churches in the Irish countryside, or even barns with sagging roofs and vines growing on them along American country backroads.
Writing in Art News, critic Richard B. Woodward explained “to condemn images of blasted lives and places that carry a whiff of ‘exploitation or detachment’ would be to do away with a sizeable chunk of pictoral and written history. Shattered cities have long aroused the imagination of Western artists, even before Renaissance Italians sought to rebuild a tradition out of the classical one they found strewn in fragments across their former empire.”
Woodward added, “Photographs of gutted buildings can never adequately describe the longstanding causes of urban poverty.”
Beard says he gets a favorable and frequently nostalgic and sentimental response to his photographs, with people mentioning, for instance, they worked or worshipped at a certain place, or had family who did.
He also likens his photos to images of senior citizens. “I really do compare it to seeing an older person, when you can see what they once were.”
The first site Beard photographed after moving here from Vermont was St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in the Troy Hill neighborhood, which was built in 1894 and torn down in 2013.
“I wasn’t planning to do that church,” Beard said, but he and his husband, John, drove by it one night, were captivated by it, and decided to come back the next day.
When it comes to ruins photography, there are a host of practical matters to consider. When he first started snapping photos, he would not ask for permission, and would not give much thought to whatever dangers might lurk in a building that is falling to pieces.
“I always say that I’m stupidly fearless,” Beard said. “I fear nothing.”
He’s only been arrested once, at a location in Millvale, and he and his husband were released once police were satisfied they were not up to any nefarious activity. Now, he sometimes gets invitations or permission from the owners of dilapidated buildings to come in and take photos.
While there are still plenty of sites throughout Pittsburgh Beard can choose from, Sts. Peter and Paul Church in East Liberty is, in fact, one of the places he would still like to capture.
“It doesn’t show these places in the best light, but it does show their beauty,” he explained.