First put up in 1913 (replacing a clock on a post that had stood here earlier), the Kaufmann’s clock is one of the famous sights of Pittsburgh. It keeps time, too.
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Kaufmann’s Clock
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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Horne’s Reflected in Four Gateway Center
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Fifth Avenue Portal, Allegheny County Courthouse
Samsung Digimax V4. This impressive portal, wide enough to drive a large delivery wagon through, leads to the central courtyard.
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Demmler Brothers Annex
This annex to the Demmler Brothers warehouse was put up at some time in the 1920s. In every way it is different from its neighbor, but the two have to make do with one address between them—100 Ross Street.
The main structure is reinforced concrete, with brick filling in the walls.
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Waterfall at PNC Firstside Center
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Two Beaux-Arts Survivors on Penn Avenue
Doubtless built for very pedestrian commercial uses—with huge windows that provided bright light from the south all day—these two buildings nevertheless could not be seen in public until they were dressed in the proper Beaux-Arts fashion. Other more recent buildings grew up around them and then were torn down, but these have survived, and seemed to be getting some work when Father Pitt walked past them recently.
Both buildings pull from the same repertory of classical ornaments in terra cotta, but mix them up in different ways.
No. 819 is more heavily ornamented—both in the sense of the abundance of ornaments and in the sense that the individual ornaments seem weightier:
No. 821, on the other hand, is decorated with a lighter and more Baroque touch:
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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At the Top of the Union Trust Building
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Urban legend says that these structures are chapels where the privileged can repent of their sins, but in fact they house the elevator mechanics and other rooftop necessities.
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Courthouse Lion
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Of all the hundreds of lions on buildings downtown, the Romanesque lions that guard the county courthouse are the most distinctive. They used to be at street level, but the lowering of the Hump, the awkward hill that used to make navigating downtown even more difficult than it is now, left them stranded far above pedestrians’ heads.
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Entrance to the Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building
Samsung Digimax V4. MacClure & Spahr designed the headquarters for Jones & Laughlin, which is now the John P. Robin Civic Building. The entrance is lavishly decorated. The angle below shows off two of the most impressive lanterns in the city.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. More pictures of the Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building: front of the building, from the southeast, and the construction of the second stage of the building.
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Rebuilding the Diamond in 2010
The Diamond or Market Square is our most fussed-with public space. Here we see it being completely reconfigured fifteen years ago, and that reconfiguration is now being completely reconfigured. This view of Pittsburgh has changed more than most in the past decade and a half; two landmark skyscrapers, the Tower at PNC Plaza and Tower Two-Sixty, have risen on spots once occupied by low buildings in the background.
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