A pair of commercial buildings with striking terra-cotta details—especially No. 819, on the left. The huge windows would have allowed light to pour into workshops on the upper floors.
Truly enlightened zoning regulations would mandate cornices with lions’ heads on all buildings more than four storeys tall.
Some of the carved ornaments on Soldiers and Sailors Hall.
Seal of the City of Pittsburgh.
The tops of Victorian commercial buildings reflected in a 1920s building across the street.
This year the Artists’ Market was moved to Fort Duquesne Boulevard, which felt much less claustrophobic than last year’s location on Penn Avenue. To judge by the crowds, it was a big success.
Henry Hornbostel was one of the first architects to employ polychrome terra cotta. Here are three different patterns from buildings at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University.
Thistles, in tribute to Andrew Carnegie’s Scottish pride.
Thirty years ago, Squonk Opera was a struggling alternative band performing in the standard struggling-local-band venues. But at some point early on, the group discovered that they could actually succeed by rebranding themselves as performance artists and getting commissions from arts organizations. Since then the “wacky provincial opera company,” now calling itself just Squonk, has been a regular at artsy events all over the world, but especially the Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Squonk will be performing Hand to Hand on Sunday, June 11, at 2:00 p.m. and again at 4:00 p.m. They claim that these are the world’s largest puppet hands, and who is going to argue?
Now an office building poetically called 2100 Wharton Street, this enormous warehouse covers almost an entire block of the South Side. It was built for the Gimbels department store in the 1920s, when it would have had rail access to the Pennsylvania Railroad spur that ran right down the middle of 21st Street.
Below we see it from the riverfront, looming over South Side rowhouses in the middle distance.
Addendum: The warehouse was built in about 1924; the architects and engineers were James P. Piper and Henry M. Kropff.
Now Madonna of Jerusalem Church of Christ the King Parish, which also includes the St. Joseph Church that once lived in this building but handed it over to Madonna of Jerusalem in 1960. This building was finished in 1874, but it was built around an earlier school from 1869. It is a typical nineteenth-century Pittsburgh Gothic church, with the buttresses and crenellations we expect from the style.
