The skyline of downtown Pittsburgh as seen from the back end of Warrington Avenue on the South Side Slopes.
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Skyline from the South Side Slopes
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Do You Know This Face?
If you are a Pittsburgher, you have probably seen it many times, but you may not have paid it much attention.
It belongs to one of the atlantes—Atlas figures—on the Kaufmann’s clock.
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905 Liberty Avenue
This exceptionally attractive industrial building is now—we really don’t have to say this, but we will anyway—loft apartments.
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The Skyline in 1999
Two negatives stitched together; they had quite different lighting, but with some yanking and prodding in the GIMP, old Pa Pitt was able to make the seam nearly invisible. At the far left, we can see a big plot of cleared ground where PNC Park is about to be built.
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Renshaw Building
The Renshaw Building at Liberty Avenue and Ninth Street was built in 1910, with an extra floor added to the top at some time in the modernistic era. It’s a perfect miniature skyscraper, with base, shaft, cap, and the outlined bosses’ floor above the main floor. There are some good terra-cotta decorations, especially around the Ninth Street entrance.
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Logan-Gregg Hardware Co. Building
Built in 1915 to a design by the prolific and versatile Charles Bickel, this is now part of the Creative and Performing Arts high school in the Cultural District, the rest of which has picked up on Bickel’s decorative stripes and made them the theme for the whole facility. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation says that “Classrooms flow from one building into the other,” which must make it difficult to know where your Theater Arts class is on any given day.
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Regal Shoe Company Building
An elegant little storefront designed by Alden & Harlow in 1908. It now houses a men’s clothing store.
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Horne’s
The old Horne’s department store is still kept in good shape on the outside, though it is no longer filled with dry-goods treasures from around the globe.
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The Roosevelt Hotel
Built in 1927, the Roosevelt was Renaissance classical on the outside and Tudor on the inside. On Emporis.com, the design is credited to Webber & Wurster, a Philadelphia firm whose only work listed on Emporis.com is this building, although some Philadelphia buildings come up in wider Internet searches. The Roosevelt went out of business as a hotel more than once, for the last time half a century ago in 1972. Since then it has been apartments of one sort or another.
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Two Sides of Charles Bickel
Charles Bickel was one of our most prolific architects of medium-sized commercial buildings. He was versatile and adaptable, as we see here in two buildings of very similar dimensions and very different styles, built within two years of each other. Above, the Maginn Building, from 1897, in a very Richardsonian Romanesque idiom; it is currently being converted into—who would have guessed?—luxury loft apartments. Below, from 1895, the United Presbyterian Board of Publications Building, in a pure Beaux-Arts classical style.
