This little building on Graeme Street, a tiny alley between the Diamond (or Market Square) and Fifth Avenue, has probably never looked better since it was new, and possibly not even then. Its little corner of downtown is full of good restaurants and expensive shops now, so it looks like an attractive place to live.
This picture is a composite of two photographs, which is the only way to get the whole building from across an exceedingly narrow street.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A540
If we put some imagination into this picture, we can see Liberty Avenue as it was in the middle 1800s, when it was the center of the wholesale food trade (which later moved out to the Strip). But the old storefronts from that era are dwarfed by the 12-storey Diamond Building at the end of the block, and that in turn is dwarfed by the later skyscrapers behind it.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A540.
Now student housing under the name “Penn Commons.” It was originally built, in 1896, for Henry Phipps, Andrew Carnegie’s close friend and the donor of the Phipps Conservatories for both Pittsburgh and Allegheny (the latter of which, much expanded, is now the National Aviary).
This is a large composite picture; don’t open the full-size version on a metered connection.
In a later article we were pleased to discover that the architects were Longfellow, Alden & Harlow.
The short stretch of Market Street between Fifth Avenue and the Diamond or Market Square.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.
Sixth Street in the theater district, seen from the Penn Avenue intersection.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.
One of old Pa Pitt’s favorites of the 1980s Postmodernist additions to downtown. It presents a different aspect from every angle, but everything is harmonized perfectly. It can be read as a 1980s update of the Beaux-Arts towers of eighty years before.
Penn Avenue downtown in the theater district. Above, looking west from Seventh Street; Theater Square (designed by Michael Graves), with the Greer Cabaret Theater and the Public Theater, is on the right, and Heinz Hall is on the left at the end of the block. Two Gateway Center looms at the end of the street. Below, from Sixth Street, with the Phipps-McElveen Building and the old Horne’s department store on the right, and Two Gateway Center looming closer.
Looking up Third Avenue from the Stanwix Street end. In the distance we can see the towering striped octagons of One Oxford Centre.
This 1980s Postmodernist tower makes a dramatic impression from the middle of Stanwix Street.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.
The Diamond Building is by MacClure and Spahr, who skillfully met the challenge of a dauntingly irregular site by filling it with a building that looks as if it’s meant to be this shape. It was originally the headquarters of the Diamond Bank, whose logo can still be seen in metal grates at ground level.
Many of the interior details are preserved inside the Diamond Building. Here we look down the stairwell with its ornate railings.
