Exchange Way is an ancient alley that has served the backs of buildings on Liberty Avenue and Penn Avenue for two centuries or more. It has never been completely continuous, and a two-block interruption caused the name of the stub of the alley that branched off Cecil Way to be forgotten, so that it was renamed Charette Way when the Pittsburgh Architectural Club opened a clubhouse with its entrance on the alley. But originally that alley was part of Exchange Way, too.
A good alley is a symphony of textures, and some of Father Pitt’s favorite pictures are black-and-white photographs of alleys.
Old Pa Pitt recommends wandering in back alleys as a hobby. You never know what you might find, from antique sculpture to ghost signs. Dimling’s hasn’t had a candy shop here for more than fifty years, but this sign still sits on the back of the building the shop once occupied, facing Exchange Way at the intersection with Tito Way.
When it was prospering, Dimling’s Liberty Avenue shop occupied two buildings and covered them with tiles that made the entire Liberty Avenue façade a giant billboard. The picture above is a detail of a much larger photograph taken by the Pittsburgh City Photographer in 1965: it may still be encumbered by copyright (although probably not, unless the copyright was renewed), but if the city of Pittsburgh wants a fee for using it Father Pitt can probably afford a quarter or so.
By the 1970s, the buildings were still a billboard for Dimling’s, but a photo from 1973 shows that the tenants were Arthur Treacher’s, an adult theater, and a massage parlor.
The wheel of history kept turning, however, and the restoration of Liberty Avenue brought these buildings back to respectable use. Peeling away the tiles revealed the old Victorian fronts, which have been lovingly restored and now make up part of the extraordinary Victorian streetscape of Liberty Avenue in the Cultural District.
This building seems to date from before the Civil War, possibly the 1850s. It was designed in the very free interpretation of Italian Renaissance that was popular at the time; later architects would have studied their historical precedents more closely, and later architects than those would have repudiated historical precedent altogether.
The building originally belonged to the Fulton Bell Foundry, which made bells for decades in downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a remnant of Victorian Second Avenue. All the remnants of Second Avenue downtown are on the south side of the Boulevard of the Allies; the street was widened in the 1920s by tearing out the buildings on the north side.
The well-preserved carved stone lintels have been lovingly cleaned.
This building was probably put up shortly after the Great Fire of 1845, to judge from the fact that it appears in an engraving of the Diamond as it was before 1852. Few buildings from before the Civil War are left downtown, and this is almost certainly the largest.
The building in the engraving is not quite the right dimensions, but the engraver (at the firm of John C. Bragdon, Pittsburgh’s busiest engravers) was probably working from hasty sketches.
Note the volutes and incised decorations in the lintels over the windows, bringing the building up to date with the latest trends in Greek Revival style.
It occurred to old Pa Pitt this afternoon that he had never seen a complete picture of the front of this building. It took several photographs and some technical fussing to get the composite picture above, but here you are.
The Tower at PNC Plaza will be ten years old this year. It occurred to Father Pitt that he had enough pictures in his collection to make up a visual story of the construction of the building, so here they are. Above, the progress as of February 18, 2014.
June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.
