The Arrott Building is the most lavishly ornamented of the Fourth Avenue bank towers. The ornaments near the top may be best appreciated from another one of the Fourth Avenue bank towers—or with a very long lens from the street.
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Lions on the Arrott Building
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Courtyard of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club
The Duquesne Club around the corner may be the center of power in Pittsburgh, but this more modest club also possesses some influence. The Alcoa Building (a bit of it is visible in the left background) actually has a notch cut out of it to avoid demolishing any of the club. The club seems to have been made from late-nineteenth-century rowhouses (back when there were still such things downtown), remodeled into a luxurious club in the 1930s.
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Triangle Building
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Iron Lantern at Trinity Cathedral
This great iron lantern is meant to be one of a pair flanking the steps to Trinity Cathedral from Sixth Avenue, but the other has gone missing. In the background is the old Gimbels department store.
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Sixth Avenue
A view of Sixth Avenue from the porch of the First Presbyterian Church, looking toward the Keenan Building with its fantastical dome. On the right in front of the Keenan Building are the Wood Street Galeries and Wood Street subway station.
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Liberty Avenue from Seventh Avenue
This is quite a stunning view for out-of-towners; Pittsburghers probably don’t realize how unusual it is to be confronted with such a well-preserved late-Victorian commercial streetscape, because we have quite a few of those.
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Old Bell Telephone Building
This 1890 building was designed by Frederick Osterling, who also gave us the Arrott Building and the Union Trust Building. It now functions as a kind of parasite on the skyscraper Bell Telephone Building next door, but it is still an impressive work of architecture.
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Mellon Square and the William Penn
Mellon Square is one of the few open spaces in downtown Pittsburgh: a whole block of landscaped park (with, curiously, shops underneath it on Smithfield Street, because the park is flat and the land is not). Above, fountains; below, a view of the square looking toward the William Penn, designed by Benno Janssen and built to be the best hotel in America when Henry Frick financed it, and still quite a luxurious hotel. In the middle distance is a Mennonite choir, which is the sort of thing you might stumble across in Mellon Square.
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Wood Street Station
The Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries occupy the old Monongahela National Bank building, one of the many peculiarly shaped buildings along Liberty Avenue where the two grids collide in the John Woods street plan from 1784. This one is a right triangle.
The picture is a composite, and if you click on it to enlarge it, you can have fun pointing out several ghosts among the people waiting for buses outside the station.
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German National Bank Sign
The Granite Building was once the headquarters of the German National Bank, and this sign is still legible on the back of it (along with remains of other generations of painted signs). Father Pitt has altered the perspective and contrast to make the old lettering as plain as possible; below is what you actually see today.
