Tasso Katselas designed the Carnegie Science Center, which is being renamed for the Kamins after a huge donation. The picture above is combined from two separate photographs.
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Carnegie Science Center
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Acrisure Stadium
With the Fort Pitt Bridge in the foreground.
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Katsafanas Coffee Co., North Side
In about 1925 the Katsafanas Coffee Company bought this building on North Avenue on the North Side and had the front completely redone in an ultramodern style. Father Pitt does not yet know the architect who supervised the remodeling, but it was obviously someone of rare taste. A renovation of the remodeling, carefully preserving what was preservable, was supervised by Pfaffman & Associates, a firm that has worked on some of our most outstanding restorations and on the sui generis Gateway subway station.
This sign was painted by the A. E Jones Sign Co., which is still in business at 507 Tripoli Street in Dutchtown, and still doing hand-painted signs.
Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000, Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Allegheny City Stables, North Side
About five years ago we looked at the Allegheny City Stables in the middle of its adaptation into loft apartments. Now the renovation is complete, and a new apartment building has gone up next door, making this block of North Avenue much more inviting. Technically it is across the street from Allegheny West, but it was the Allegheny West Civic Council that saved the building, and socially it forms part of today’s Allegheny West rather than the rest of the “Central Northside” neighborhood as designated on city planning maps.
Sony Alpha 3000. -
PNC Park
A large composite picture (7.6 megabytes, in case you’re on a metered connection) of the ballpark as seen from the Andy Warhol Bridge.
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Alcoa Corporate Center, North Shore
The headquarters of Alcoa since it moved out of the Alcoa Building, and now also the headquarters of Alcoa’s spinoff Arconic. The river side of the building is all curves and exposed aluminum, naturally.
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Bridge and Stadium
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Moderne Industrial Building on the North Side
A streamlined industrial building on North Avenue. We suspect that the part now filled in with red diamonds may have originally been a storefront or showroom for the business.
Sony Alpha 3000. -
Pittsburgh Tag Co. Building, North Side
This building seems to have been put up for Allen Kirkpatrick & Co., but for years it was the home of the Pittsburgh Tag Co., as this ghost sign tells us. It has been vacant for some time.
Sony Alpha 3000. The Pittsburgh Tag Company was founded in 1927, as we find in the Paper Trade Journal, December 15, 1927:
Pittsburgh, Pa.—The Pittsburgh Tag Company, care of Charles F. C. Arensberg, 834 Amberson street, Pittsburgh, recently organized with a capital of $50,000, plans the operation of a local plant for the manufacture of paper tags and kindred specialties. Mr. Arensberg will be treasurer of the new company; James M. Graham and Jonathan S. Green will be directors.
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Allegheny Auto Spring Co., North Side
You might think this was a building that had been abandoned a century ago and somehow pickled in an unusually intact state (though a few bricks have crumbled off the top). But in fact the Allegheny Auto Spring Co. is still in business, still serving the people who need auto springs and need them done well. The painted signs are legible, so why replace them? Thus we have a glimpse of the Pittsburgh of the early automobile age surviving into the twenty-first century.
Sony Alpha 3000. The building itself predates the current business. It was probably built in the 1890s; in the early 1900s it appears on old maps marked “Wisconsin Granite Co. Lessee”; in 1910 it is marked “Paint Whs.”; and in 1923 “Thompson & Co.” Old Pa Pitt does not know when the Allegheny Auto Spring Co. moved in, but it has to have been a couple of generations ago at the latest.
