These two gems on Penn Avenue were built, to judge by the style, just about the time the two states for which they were named were admitted to the Union. They are just up the street from the Pittsburgh Glass Center on the Friendship side of Penn Avenue, but most Pittsburghers tend to refer to that whole Penn Avenue strip as “Garfield.”
Not quite as artistic as the Wadsworth plates, Rhodes Brothers concrete plates are still attractive designs. This one was set in a driveway in Friendship.
Pittsburgh used to be a city of massive black stone buildings, but, since the end of the age of steel, the buildings have been cleaned one by one, revealing the actual color of the stones as they came out of the quarry. Few of the black stone buildings are left. Here is one of them: Fourth Presbyterian in Friendship. Over the years, the stones are gradually losing their sooty coating, revealing what looks like red sandstone underneath. But they are still strikingly black, the way all proper Pittsburgh stones used to be.
