Just a quick walk up one block of Liberty Avenue, from the Wood Street subway station to the EBA busway stop.

Downtown Pittsburgh is built on a tiny triangle of land at the junction of two rivers. In the latter 1700s, when the town was laid out, rational town planning was very fashionable, and the grid was the ideal. The only way to lay a grid in a triangle, however, was to make it two colliding grids at different angles, and Liberty Avenue is where the collision occurs. The southeastern side of Liberty Avenue is lined with buildings in all sorts of odd shapes, especially triangles.

Here are two classic Victorian commercial buildings, one updated with a bit of postmodernist frippery on top. Would you care to buy it? It certainly has a lot of natural light from those windows.

Looking up from under the rotunda of Penn Station, which is now converted to apartments and offices. If you want to catch a train, you have to go out back by the trash cans, where a small modern station has been grafted onto the main building.

A few years ago, when the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail (the masterpiece of H. H. Richardson) was being restored and the jail turned into offices for county bureaucrats, one of the high stone walls was taken apart, giving us a glimpse of the stonework. It turns out to be brick with a facing of large granite blocks, as we see here.

Incidentally, Pittsburghers who visit Minneapolis will find a startlingly familiar building: the Minneapolis City Hall is an unabashed copy of the Allegheny County Courthouse.

The plaza at the center of PPG Place is now filled with a skating rink in the winter. But a few years ago, before the skating rink, on Light-Up Night it used to be filled with luminarias—paper bags weighted with sand and lit by candles. (Luminarias, normally associated with Latin American culture, are an old tradition in Pittsburgh for some reason.)

Streets in downtown Pittsburgh are extraordinarily narrow by American standards. Here Oliver Avenue cuts through a narrow gorge formed by some celebrated buildings (the Union Trust Building, the William Penn Hotel, the Oliver Building) and some slightly less celebrated buildings.

A light fixture on the Frick Building. Henry Clay Frick intended this to be the best commercial building in America, so naturally his architect, the great Daniel Burnham, specified the best light fixtures in America.