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 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.