Twenty years ago, Liberty Avenue was still a street parents warned their children about, the seedy heart of the seediest part of downtown. Now it’s one of our signature boulevards, with a parade of old and new architecture that makes it one of America’s great cityscapes. Much of that revitalization can be credited to the conscious effort of a few urban dreamers who dared to imagine a great future for an area most Pittsburghers preferred to ignore.
The octagonal tower of One Mellon Center, Pittsburgh’s second-tallest building, seen from the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Grant Street. In the foreground at left is the dramatic base of the U. S. Steel Tower, whose colossal bulk is supported on impossibly spindly piers, defying gravity like something from the imagination of Rene Magritte. (From a distance, the building strikes old Pa Pitt as pedestrian, but the lobby and mezzanine are dramatic.) At right is the base of the Koppers Building.
The Nativity, as it would have looked if it had happened on the plaza below the U. S. Steel tower.
A giant Christmas tree, a skating rink, and a whole city of glass fairy castles.
Christmas decorations are going up in the Allegheny County Courthouse. Father Pitt apologizes for distorted lines in these pictures, caused by the cheap lens on a cheap digital camera.
Two colliding grids make up downtown Pittsburgh’s street layout, and the collision happens at Liberty Avenue, giving us a fine array of odd-shaped buildings. This triangular structure, built as a bank, now houses the Wood Street subway station below and the Wood Street Galleries, an important contemporary art gallery, on the upper floors.
While the Gateway Center Station is closed, Wood Street is the terminus of the subway downtown.
This picture was taken with a Kiev-4 camera, a Ukrainian rangefinder that Father Pitt loves with an unreasoning passion. He would like to state for the record that the hideously rusted car in the foreground is not his fault.
The interior of Henry Hornbostel’s City-County Building is designed on the model of a Roman basilica. It’s an excellent example of architecture as message, conveying the idea that your local government, powerful and benevolent, is at your service. It’s also a very practical interior, with the large central hall making it easy to cover the short distances between the most important departments of government. That’s a very good thing, because everyone knows that any dealing with city or county government will inevitably involve visits to at least three separate offices.
Construction can reveal previously impossible views. Here we see the whole CNG tower from top to bottom, a 1980s postmodernist palace that presents radically different—but still harmonious—faces from different angles.
The elevator doors in the City-County Building give us an allegorical history of the growth of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County and their civic buildings, ending with the current courthouse and the City-County Building itself.
Looking up at Fifth Avenue Place from the intersection of Forbes and Stanwix.
