Is this the narrowest building in the world? That depends on how you define “narrowest” and “building.” At five feet two inches deep, the Skinny Building is at least remarkably skinny. A building in Vancouver’s Chinatown is listed by recordkeepers as the shallowest in the world, but although its ground floor is four feet eleven inches deep, oriels make the upper floor much deeper.
The Skinny Building is at Forbes Avenue and Wood Street, a few blocks from the Wood Street subway station.
It’s a giant inflatable rubber ducky. Why? There may be no good answer to that question. But, to judge by the crowds at the Point today (the duck’s last weekend in the water), it seems that a giant inflatable rubber duck was just what Pittsburgh wanted. The Port Authority is running double streetcars and Subway Locals (which serve only from Station Square through downtown to Allegheny) to handle the traffic on the subway. Downtown is full of tourists from exotic places like Iowa who came to have their pictures taken in front of the rubber duck. Traffic jams surround the Point. Street vendors are selling bags and bags of rubber ducks. Restaurants downtown are packed. All because of a rubber ducky.
Heinz Hall, the former Loew’s Penn movie palace, brings a little taste of pre-revolutionary Versailles to the theater district downtown. These low-light snapshots are a bit grainy, but they convey something of the opulence of the interior.
The whole North Shore of the Allegheny opposite downtown has been turned into parkland, where you can stroll, bike, or even rent a kayak—or just sit and enjoy a spectacular urban landscape.
The Fulton Building, with its enormous arch, has been turned into a luxury hotel right in the heart of the theater district. It is so much in the heart, in fact, that the entrance to the Byham Theater goes right through the Fulton Building, and the marquee is on the Sixth Street front of it. Many theater-goers probably never realize that, by the time they have navigated the long foyer and ended up in the real lobby of the theater, they have gone all the way through one building and ended up in another. That low brick building to the left of the Fulton Building is the theater itself—downtown’s oldest working theater, built in 1903 as the Gayety vaudeville house (originally with its entrance on the river side), and later known as the Fulton until the Byham family paid for a major renovation in 1996. Behind the theater is the CNG Tower, a landmark of 1980s postmodernist architecture that presents radically different views from different angles.
The Seventh Street or Andy Warhol Bridge is covered with knitting—supposedly the biggest “yarn-bombing” project in history. If terrorism were always so cheerful, old Pa Pitt would be completely in favor of it.
As a secret fan of De Stijl, old Pa Pitt was particularly taken with this piece.
The “Knit the Bridge” project has generated quite a bit of news coverage across the country:
The Ewart Building on Liberty Avenue was built in 1891, shortly after Richardson’s courthouse was finished—one of many Romanesque buildings that followed Richardson’s masterpiece in Pittsburgh.
Frederick Osterling’s Arrott Building, the most ornate of the famous Fourth Avenue towers, has a small but gorgeous lobby filled with marble and brass.
The Tower at PNC Plaza, the biggest skyscraper project in Pittsburgh since the 1980s, has just begun to rise at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street. Traditionally skyscrapers have grown in a doughnut-shaped area of the Golden Triangle, with the hole in the Fifth Avenue shopping district; but now that much of the shopping has moved elsewhere, the hole may begin to fill in.
Those plucky colonials have raised their rebel flag over the blockhouse at Fort Pitt, Britain’s most important Western fort.
