From the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Blue Book, 1899-1900. This building is now the William Pitt Student Union, having been absorbed, like much of the rest of Oakland, into the University of Pittsburgh.
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Hotel Schenley
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Tufa Bridge and Stairway, Schenley Park
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School for Blind Children
This building from 1894, right next to Schenley Farms in Oakland, was designed by George L. Orth, and still houses the school he designed it for.
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Schenley Farms
Stuck in a corner of the university district in Oakland, Schenley Farms is a delightful surprise. The institutional buildings of the University of Pittsburgh come to a sudden halt, and all at once there are tree-lined streets with century-old houses in a broad but harmonious variety of styles—everything from Italian Renaissance palaces to Tudor mansions to rustic stone cottages.
The streets are named after what the projectors of the neighborhood considered the greatest writers of the modern age. We can still see two of their names in brass in the sidewalk at the intersection of Parkman and Lytton—that’s Francis Parkman, the great American historian, and Lord Lytton, or Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the inspiration for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
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Cathedral of Learning and the Carnegie
Seen from in front of Phipps Conservatory.
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Oakland in the Snow
Looking up Bellefield Avenue during this afternoon’s snowstorm.
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Grand Staircase, Carnegie Museum
The Grand Staircase is meant to be the main focal point of the museum, but the unsympathetic addition of the Scaife Galleries, with a new main entrance, makes the staircase something of a backwater. It’s still grand, however, even when overrun by the International. The murals are by John White Alexander.
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Webster Hall
Webster Hall, built in 1926, was designed by Henry Hornbostel to be the grandest apartment block in the city of Pittsburgh. It still holds a prominent place in the Oakland monumental district, where Hornbostel contributed more buildings than any other architect.
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View of Oakland from St. Michael’s Cemetery
St. Michael’s cemetery occupies a large patch of precipitous ground on the South Side Slopes. The views from here are breathtaking and sometimes a little terrifying. Here we see Oakland in the distance across the Monongahela, with a few rows of typical Slopes frame houses in the middle distance.
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Oakland Panorama
A panoramic view of the skyline of Oakland from Schenley Park. Few Pittsburghers realize what an unusual phenomenon Oakland is: a second city within the city, and a city of the mind—a city whose towers are devoted to learning and research.
