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Arsenal Bank Building
We saw the 1884 Arsenal Bank earlier from across Butler Street. Here is the 43rd Street side of the building, which we can see clearly thanks to the disappearance years ago of the neighboring buildings.
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South Side, Bluff, and Lower Hill
A view from the South Side Slopes. Below, a closer look at part of Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital on the Bluff.
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More Reflections of St. Paul’s
Reflections of the towers of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the windows of the Software Engineering Institute.
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Bair & Gazzam Building, Strip
A dignified industrial building now converted to loft apartments. It was built in the 1890s as a machine shop for the Bair & Gazzam Manufacturing Company, and by 1910 it belonged to the Ruud Manufacturing Company, makers of those marvelous automatic water heaters. The style is very much in line with the industrial Romanesque that was popular in the late 1800s; but if we look carefully at the arches on the ground floor, we notice that they are very subtly pointed.
Father Pitt does not know the whole history of this building, but it looks as though the top two floors were a later addition.
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McNally Building
The McNally Building on Penn Avenue was built in 1896. It is a good example of the kind of tall, narrow building that grew up in the early days of the elevator. But of course the most important thing about this picture is that it allows old Pa Pitt to indulge in his habit of photographing buses coming toward you.
Addendum: The architect was Thomas D. Evans, who also designed the Springfield and Morse schools. Source: The Inland Architect and News Record, March 1895.
Architect T. D. Evans has plans completed for the McNally building, an eight-story warehouse, to be erected on Penn avenue, stone and brick.
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Mary L. Bayer House, South Side Slopes
Just about every ugly thing that can happen to an old house has happened to this once-grand Second Empire mansion on the back end of Warrington Avenue. It has been sheathed in artificial siding. All the windows have been replaced with windows and doors in the wrong shapes. Almost all the trim has been removed (if you enlarge the picture, you can find a tiny remnant in the pediment over the front entrance). The porch has been replaced with treated lumber, which manufacturers assure us never has to be painted and therefore is always allowed to decay into even uglier colors than it was originally. The front entrance has been replaced with cheap doors from a home center.
Yet, with all that, there is still a pleasing symmetry to the house that gives it a kind of senescent dignity. At present, it stands in a nice working-class neighborhood where houses are worthless, or at least not worth enough to make any substantial work on this one profitable. But it has a magnificent view of the city, and if someone with a little money were to adopt it, it could be remade into an attractive single-family mansion again, or a more attractive apartment house.
Old Pa Pitt does not know the history of this house. On the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, it first appears on the 1890 layer, suggesting that it was built in the 1880s. From then until 1923, it is marked as belonging to Mary L. Bayer or M. L. Bayer.
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A Walk in the Kane Woods
An early-fall walk in the Kane Woods Nature Area in Scott Township. Above, the Tom the Tinker Trail.
Blue Wood Aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium).
A moss-covered log.
The Liberty Trail.
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St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church, Arlington
Now a residential duplex, this is a tiny Romanesque church made to seem much more substantial by its weighty tower and its steeply pitched roof.
