These distinctive lion heads hold up the arch of the tympanum over the Wood Street entrance to the People’s Savings Bank tower.
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Lions on the People’s Savings Bank Tower
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Heinz Hall
One of the first great silent movie palaces (the old Loew’s Penn) to be turned into a concert hall, Heinz Hall set a trend, both here and elsewhere. With the old Stanley and Fulton (now the Benedum and Byham), it is one of the three large anchors of the theater district downtown.
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Tympanum on the People’s Savings Bank
John Massey Rhind, the famous sculptor who did the four representatives of the Noble Quartet outside the Carnegie and the Robert Burns statue outside Phipps Conservatory, contributed decorative reliefs to the 1901 People’s Savings Bank tower on Fourth Avenue. This one is over the Wood Street entrance.
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Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building
On the National Register of Historic Places as an outstanding example of modernism, this 1957 building by the Pittsburgh firm Dowler & Dowler (that’s Press C. Dowler and William C. Dowler) has been turned into luxury apartments, like everything else downtown. It also houses the City Charter High School.
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Lions on the Arrott Building
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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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.
