-
Skyline Abstraction
-
Harris Theater
This little movie house, built as the Avenue Cinema in 1931, became the Art Cinema in 1935; from the 1960s until the 1990s, it showed “adult movies,” which old Pa Pitt assumed meant that all the films were over 21 years old. But it had begun life as an art-film house, and in 1995 it resumed that role under the name “Harris,” after one of the founders of the movie-theater business—John P. Harris, who with his brother-in-law opened the world’s first movie theater, the Nickelodeon, which was on Smithfield Street (a plaque marks the site today). Movies had been shown in theaters before, but the Nickelodeon was the first to show only movies. The idea caught on with amazing rapidity, and “Nickelodeons” sprouted everywhere.
-
Clark Building
The Clark Building was built in 1928 at the same time as the Stanley Theater (now the Benedum Center) around the corner, and designed by the same architects—the Hoffman-Henon Company, which specialized in theaters but could also turn out a pretty good skyscraper in a sort of modernized Beaux-Arts classical style. The upper floors are apartments, but the lower floors are still, as they have been for many years, the center of the jewelry district downtown.
-
Ewart Building
Charles Bickel was quite at home in the Romanesque style, and he prospered in a city that had gone mad for Romanesque after Richardson’s County Courthouse appeared. The Ewart Building was put up in 1892. Old Pa Pitt was attracted to this morning view by the pattern of reflections on Liberty Avenue.
-
901 and 903 Liberty Avenue
Two fine commercial buildings on Liberty Avenue. The large windows on the second, third, and fourth floors of No. 903 suggest workshops, which generally had the largest possible windows to take advantage of natural light.
Every once in a while old Pa Pitt slips in a picture taken with a cheap phone. This is one of them; he mentions it to point out that, within their limitations (this one demands bright light for acceptably sharp pictures), even cheap phone cameras can produce good pictures. The camera you have with you is always better than the one in the camera bag at home.
-
Strawberry Way
-
Tower Two-Sixty
The blockish Tower Two-Sixty looms over the little human-sized buildings on the Diamond.
-
Terra-Cotta Decorations on the Buhl Building
The Buhl Building, an earlier work of Benno Janssen, is covered with Wedgwood-style terra-cotta decorations. Below, the Market Street end of the building.
-
Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building
We’ve already seen this building from the side and rear. Here is most of it from the front, with the Boulevard of the Allies ramp and the low roofline of Chinatown in the foreground. From this angle we can see, if we know its history, how the building was put up in two stages: the original was eight storeys tall, and then five more storeys (counting the top storey, which has no windows on the front) were added a decade later. That accounts for the unorthodox stripe of ornament across the middle, which used to be the cap of the building. But the architects, MacClure and Spahr, did such a good job of extending the building that, without knowing its history, we would never have guessed that the top floors were added later.
Addendum: According to an article in the Engineering News for January 18, 1917, the addition was planned when the original building was put up, so MacClure & Spahr had to create a building that would look complete at two stages. That’s how you separate the pros from the amateurs in the architecture business.
-
Mayor Guthrie
George W. Guthrie was mayor of Pittsburgh when the Keenan Building was put up in 1907, and here is his face among the terra-cotta decorations on the building, where he keeps company with other prominent men of Pittsburgh. Pittsburghers remember Guthrie as the mayor who finally engineered the successful conquest of Allegheny, so North Siders sometimes think of him the way Ukrainians think of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps his most important accomplishment, though, was clean city water that, for the first time, brought typhoid under control in Pittsburgh, where it had been a scourge for the first century and a half of the city’s existence.
