Here is the view that gives Fineview its name. The neighborhood was originally called Nunnery Hill, but neighborhood business interests petitioned the city to change the name in 1915. The Fineview Overlook on Catoma Street at Lanark Street is difficult to find even if you know where you’re going, but the view is worth it.
A view from Fifth Avenue between Three and One PNC Plaza toward Two PNC Plaza and the K&L Gates Center.
“The Kaufmann & Baer department store is an enormous shiny white terra cotta building, filled with windows and probably good for its purpose.” So the architect Aymar Embury II (did ever an architect have such an architecty name?) dismissed this building in his article about Pittsburgh architecture in 1915,1 when the building was new. It was put up for Kaufmann & Baer—the Kaufmanns being members of the same family as Morris Kaufmann, who ran that other department store with a similar name on Smithfield Street. Most older Pittsburghers remember it affectionately as the Gimbels Building, because Gimbels bought Kaufmann & Baer in 1925 and this building was Gimbels for most of its life as a department store. Starrett & Van Vleck, New York specialists in department stores, were the architects.
Sunlight pours into the long passageway that connects the Steel Plaza subway station to Grant Street.
When Tasso Katselas designed the annex to the May Building (which was designed by Charles Bickel), modernism was not just fashion—it was dogma. Fashions have changed and dogmas have relaxed, and the annex is being remodeled to be less aggressively different from the original building. We’ll have more pictures as the remodeling takes shape.
The skyline of Pittsburgh in 1963 was very different from the skyline today. The U. S. Steel Building had not yet risen to dwarf everything else, and the other skyscrapers that today seem to be the signature forms of the skyline would go up in the 1980s. At the extreme right, we can see the Civic Auditorium, only two years old; it would later be known as the Civic Arena, and then as the Mellon Arena.
This panorama was built from two pictures taken by Roger Wollstadt, to whom all our gratitude is due. Old Pa Pitt saw them in Wikimedia Commons and noticed that Mr. Wollstadt had taken them from the same spot, merely rotating the camera a bit to take in a different part of the cityscape. That meant they would probably combine with no visible errors, and indeed they did.
Note the Creative Commons license for the picture, which is not the public-domain dedication Father Pitt uses for his own pictures. You can do anything you like with this picture, but you must attribute Roger Wollstadt as the original author, and you must make any new versions available under the same license.
In the early 1800s, the Diamond was the location of the courthouse (moved to Grant Street in 1857), which put the courts at the bustling heart of the city. The market itself was a semicircle, and that unusual design has been revived for the newly reconfigured Diamond.
The other day old Pa Pitt went lion-hunting on Fourth Avenue. It’s a good game to play with children or out-of-town visitors: walk down Fourth Avenue and see how many lions you can count. They’ll have fun noticing the wide variety of carved lions, but they’ll also be noticing details of the architecture around them, which can start interesting conversations. We begin with the famous Dollar Bank lions—actually painstakingly accurate hand-carved duplicates of the originals, which were the work of Max Kohler. The originals were moved inside the bank, where they will be protected from weather and accidents.
These lions decorate the Fourth Avenue front of the Colonial Trust Company building, now part of Point Park University.
A lion on the front of the Keystone Bank Building.
Very Romanesque lions on the Peoples Savings Bank Building.
Now, when we come to the Arrott Building, we have to suspend the game, because…
…there are, by Father Pitt’s estimate, more than 200 lions on the Arrott Building.
