The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente Bridge, looking toward the North Side, in glorious black and white.
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Iron Lantern at Trinity Cathedral
This great iron lantern is meant to be one of a pair flanking the steps to Trinity Cathedral from Sixth Avenue, but the other has gone missing. In the background is the old Gimbels department store.
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Sixth Avenue
A view of Sixth Avenue from the porch of the First Presbyterian Church, looking toward the Keenan Building with its fantastical dome. On the right in front of the Keenan Building are the Wood Street Galeries and Wood Street subway station.
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“The Overturned Carriage” by David Gilmour Blythe
David Gilmour Blythe, self-taught painter, produced some of the best satirical and humorous art in the nineteenth century. What made his humor and satire stand out was his eye for composition and shading: he may make you laugh, but it’s likely that the first thing you noticed was the striking play of light and shadow. He lived in Pittsburgh and environs all his life, and the Carnegie Museum of Art has a whole wall of his paintings in the nineteenth-century gallery; this is one of them. (The Duquesne Club also has a distinguished collection.) Father Pitt has known some horses like this one. How do you know when your horse has had enough? Don’t worry: the horse will let you know.
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Liberty Avenue from Seventh Avenue
This is quite a stunning view for out-of-towners; Pittsburghers probably don’t realize how unusual it is to be confronted with such a well-preserved late-Victorian commercial streetscape, because we have quite a few of those.
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Old Bell Telephone Building
This 1890 building was designed by Frederick Osterling, who also gave us the Arrott Building and the Union Trust Building. It now functions as a kind of parasite on the skyscraper Bell Telephone Building next door, but it is still an impressive work of architecture.
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Mellon Square and the William Penn
Mellon Square is one of the few open spaces in downtown Pittsburgh: a whole block of landscaped park (with, curiously, shops underneath it on Smithfield Street, because the park is flat and the land is not). Above, fountains; below, a view of the square looking toward the William Penn, designed by Benno Janssen and built to be the best hotel in America when Henry Frick financed it, and still quite a luxurious hotel. In the middle distance is a Mennonite choir, which is the sort of thing you might stumble across in Mellon Square.
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Forbes Avenue, Oakland
A 61C bus comes eastbound on Forbes Avenue toward the stop in front of the Carnegie Museum of Art. In the background we can see central Oakland, with two of the three Litchfield Towers, the distinctive cylindrical skyscraper dormitories.
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Wood Street Station
The Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries occupy the old Monongahela National Bank building, one of the many peculiarly shaped buildings along Liberty Avenue where the two grids collide in the John Woods street plan from 1784. This one is a right triangle.
The picture is a composite, and if you click on it to enlarge it, you can have fun pointing out several ghosts among the people waiting for buses outside the station.
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Beechview Theater Under Renovation
A videography and photography company that has been in business for some years is renovating the old Beechview Theater. This was a silent-movie house built before 1914 (since it appears in a guide to Pittsburgh published that year, in which Beechview is described as “beyond the South Hills”); after its movie days, it spent a long time as an American Legion post, and then for a while it was a nursing home. Old Pa Pitt hopes it will be loved in its new career that brings it back very close to its roots.
An update: According to a 1923 map, this was called the Olympic Theater. There were at least three theaters in Beechview in 1923. See the theater in its restored state here.
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