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Fall Colors at Gateway Center
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Autumn Skyline
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Gateway Center Fountain in Pink
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Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown
Still Pittsburgh’s largest hotel, this opened in 1959 as the Pittsburgh Hilton. It was designed by William Tabler, the Hilton company’s pet architect. Originally it was, as James D. Van Trump told us in The Stones of Pittsburgh, “partially sheathed in panels of gold anodized aluminum, very appropriate to a luxury hotel.” The panels have been painted over.
The addition to the front opened in 2014; it does not seem to go with the rest of the building.
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The City of a Dream
Fujifilm FinePix HS10, with an imitation Tri-X Pan filter applied. As some vast heart that high in health
Beats in its mighty breast,
So, to and fro, thy living wealth
Throbs through the boundless West.
Thy keels the broad Ohio plow,
Or seek the Atlantic main;
Thy fabrics find the Arctic snow,
Or reach Zahara’s plain!Toil on, huge Cyclop as thou art,
Though grimed with dust and smoke,
And breathing with convulsive start—
There’s music in each stroke!
What if the stranger smirch and soil
Upon thy forehead sees?
Better the wealth of honest toil
Than of ignoble ease!And yet thou’rt beautiful—a queen
Throned on her royal seat!
All glorious in emerald sheen,
Where thy fair waters meet.
And when the night comes softly down,
And the moon lights the stream,
In the mild ray appears the town,
The city of a dream!——“Pittsburgh” by E. M. Sidney in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, Vol. XXX (1847), p. 249.
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Looking Up at the Horne’s Building
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. The decorated cornice of the Horne’s building gleams in late-afternoon sun.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285. -
Grant Street Transportation Center
This is a rather grandly named bus station and parking garage. It’s certainly a striking building to look at; it was designed by IKM, descended from the grand old firm of Ingham & Boyd. There ought to be someone in the crow’s nest at the top of the tower to shout “Bus ho!” whenever a Greyhound is sighted.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. -
Granite Building
The Wood Street end of the Granite Building in a composite photograph that gets a little fuzzy toward the top, but otherwise gives us a good notion of the design of the Romanesque extravaganza. It was built in 1889 as the German National Bank; the architects were Bickel & Brennan—the Bickel being Charles Bickel, who would go one to become Pittsburgh’s most prolific architect of commercial buildings.
We also have pictures of some of Achille Giammartini’s carvings on the building, and of the German National Bank ghost signs still visible on the side that faces Liberty Avenue.
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Fifth Avenue Place
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U. S. Steel Tower
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Looming behind Duquesne University on the Bluff.
