For years this building has been hidden behind a garish modernist façade. Renovation work shows us a modest mid-nineteenth-century building typical of old Birmingham, the narrow-streeted section of the South Side up to 17th Street.
Update: The building has been restored to something more like its original appearance.
The Duquesne Club around the corner may be the center of power in Pittsburgh, but this more modest club also possesses some influence. The Alcoa Building (a bit of it is visible in the left background) actually has a notch cut out of it to avoid demolishing any of the club. The club seems to have been made from late-nineteenth-century rowhouses (back when there were still such things downtown), remodeled into a luxurious club in the 1930s.
The aptly named Triangle Building fills the small triangle of space left over from the awkward intersection of Liberty Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Smithfield Street. It was originally known, it seems, as the McCance Block.
View of the Great Fire of Pittsburgh, by William C. Wall (1846)
In 1845 a catastrophic fire swept through the booming Western city of Pittsburgh. Much of the city was destroyed, including the covered wooden Monongahela bridge, where the Smithfield Street Bridge is now. William C. Wall, a local painter of some skill, saw an artistic and financial opportunity and painted small views of the destruction, which seem to have been reproduced as prints (prints of great catastrophes being very popular among some of the more morose and sentimental Victorians). The next year he created a larger painting with a view of the fire; though he obviously did not have the fire in front of him as he painted, he seems to have depicted fairly accurately the extent of the conflagration—note the area to the west of the bridge that was spared the flames, an area that included the Burke Building, which still stands today.
These three paintings hang together in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s gallery of “European and American Art ca. 1820-1860.” Finding that there seemed to be no good reproductions of them on the Internet, old Pa Pitt took these, which give a fair impression of the pictures as they appear on the wall.
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Birmingham, by William C. Wall (1845)
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Boyd’s Hill, by William C. Wall (1845)
Few drivers pause on their way up the mountain to notice the art that went into designing the railings along the McArdle Roadway, which opened in 1933. (The lower section, that is; the upper section, from the Liberty Bridge to Grandview Avenue, had already opened in 1928.) There was a time when even the most utilitarian public works were expected to be decorative as well.
The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente Bridge, looking toward the North Side, in glorious black and white.
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.
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.
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.
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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