This Brezhnev-era apartment building from 1964 has little to recommend it architecturally, but is there a finer location in the city? Point State Park is the front yard; the Gateway subway station is next door; the Cultural District is just up the street.
The “Bridal Veil” Spirea (Spiraea × vanhouttei) is a very popular planting in the Pittsburgh area. It blooms only briefly, but it is glorious for those few days.
The front of this building is a narrow storefront, with upstairs apartments, on Butler Street; but it goes way back, and here we see the 37th Street side. The mansard roof marks it as the Second Empire style, named for its prevalence in the French empire of Napoleon III.
The Lower Lawrenceville business district was practically abandoned ten years ago; now it is a lively place, with trendy restaurants, cafes, and shops.
This one huge extreme-wide-angle picture is put together from nine separate photographs, and a few stitching errors are apparent if you look at it full-sized.
The Chapel Shelter is so named because it began life as a little Presbyterian church. It fell into disrepair, and was very nearly demolished a few years ago; but a restoration project has made this picnic shelter the gem of the park again.
The Allegheny Observatory gives its name to the Observatory Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh, although—oddly—the city government knows the neighborhood as Perry North, in spite of its residents’ insistence on calling it Observatory Hill.
Father Pitt thinks this large bracket fungus looks like Polyporus squamosus, the Pheasant’s Back or Dryad’s Saddle. He would be delighted to be corrected by someone who understands the fungus world. It was growing on a fallen log in the Kane Woods Nature Area, Scott Township.
It used to be the Hilton, whose management kept flirting with bankruptcy. For some time the odd swoopy addition on the front was stalled half-finished; it is now completed and open. This is Pittsburgh’s tallest hotel, and probably the ugliest as well. But as a place to stay, it has its benefits—among them, spectacular views in all directions.
One of the more prominent of the skyscrapers from the Postmodernist boom in the 1980s. The spindle that sticks out the top has a particular meaning: it marks the height the builders had intended the building to reach. They were thwarted by the city government, which thought for some reason that it would be too tall at that height, although the monstrous U. S. Steel Building had not bothered them a decade and a half before.
Do you like this building better with or without a leafy frame? Father Pitt is willing to oblige either way.
The entrance to the Gateway station, which as a work of architecture is hard to classify. The best term Father Pitt can come up with is “whimsical.”
A train of two Siemens SD-400 cars, built in the 1980s and rebuilt a few years ago, stops at Gateway on its way to the North Side. Trolley geeks will be interested to know that St. Louis also uses SD-400s; but the St. Louis cars do not have the extra street-level doors—which old Pa Pitt calls the “Pittsburgh doors”—to cope with Pittsburgh’s odd mix of platform-level stations and street-level stops. The newer CAF cars in Pittsburgh had to make the same adaptation. One wonders whether trolley makers groan when they get a call from Pittsburgh, or whether dollar signs pop up in their eyes when they think of what they can charge for customization.
