A small and attractive apartment building in the part of Park Place that belongs to Wilkinsburg. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but these curved metal balconies that look as though they are serving the tenants up on platters were a favorite detail of Wilkinsburg’s own Milligan & Miller.
The South Side Market House, designed originally by Charles Bickel, and given its current form by Stanley Roush, taken on film in glorious black and white. We also have color pictures and some historical photos of the South Side Market House.
A long row of mansard-roofed frame houses whose various alterations have not completely diminished the impressive effect of the row.
Shadyside seems to have a larger concentration of modernistic mid-twentieth-century apartment buildings than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood. Without any other information, old Pa Pitt would guess this one dates from about 1940.
Glass block from Pittsburgh Corning became a badge of modernity. If that were not enough, the metal awning over the entrance should do it.
This little church—now converted to a private home—presents a bricky front to the world in a typically Pittsburgh Romanesque style.
But the front is only a few feet deep; it is attached to a modest frame building.
The Negley Station is an easy walk from both the Ellsworth Avenue and Walnut Street business districts in Shadyside, as well as businesses on Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard. Like most busway stations in Pittsburgh, it is a direct replacement for an old commuter-rail station: in this case, the Roup station that used to be at exactly the same place. (South Negley Avenue was part of Roup Street until the 1890s, and rail stations tend to keep their names even when the street for which they are named changes.)
Commuters gather on the inbound platform in late morning rush hour.
And here come the buses.
The outbound platform in evening sunlight.
A view from Fifth Avenue between Three and One PNC Plaza toward Two PNC Plaza and the K&L Gates Center.
On an otherwise commercialized section of Centre Avenue, this little U-shaped terrace of rowhouses is almost invisible. As in Dover Gables, the fronts are arranged around a vehicle-free garden court.
“The Kaufmann & Baer department store is an enormous shiny white terra cotta building, filled with windows and probably good for its purpose.” So the architect Aymar Embury II (did ever an architect have such an architecty name?) dismissed this building in his article about Pittsburgh architecture in 1915,1 when the building was new. It was put up for Kaufmann & Baer—the Kaufmanns being members of the same family as Morris Kaufmann, who ran that other department store with a similar name on Smithfield Street. Most older Pittsburghers remember it affectionately as the Gimbels Building, because Gimbels bought Kaufmann & Baer in 1925 and this building was Gimbels for most of its life as a department store. Starrett & Van Vleck, New York specialists in department stores, were the architects.
