
Old Pa Pitt published a nearly identical picture of the Victory Building a while ago, but he was unhappy with the patch of blinding sunlight that washed out one corner of it. Here is the same view in more even lighting.

Old Pa Pitt published a nearly identical picture of the Victory Building a while ago, but he was unhappy with the patch of blinding sunlight that washed out one corner of it. Here is the same view in more even lighting.

Science, art, music, literature: these were Andrew Carnegie’s “Noble Quartet,” to which he dedicated his colossal gift to Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institute. To represent these four disciplines, Carnegie’s favorite sculptor, J. Massey Rhind, gave us Galileo, Michelangelo, Bach, and Shakespeare.
An interesting question: would we make the same choices today? Perhaps. But if we were to change the list, old Pa Pitt might suggest John Brashear, Andy Warhol, Earl Hines, and August Wilson. Not that he has any regional prejudices.

Galileo dwarfs that little Atlas fellow.


Michelangelo works on a model.



Bach thinks musical thoughts.



Tunnel Park in the SouthSide Works isn’t very picturesque, especially in the winter; and yet anything can be picturesque with a layer of mist added.

The Ninth Street or Rachel Carson Bridge is closed for construction for a while. Here we see it in early-morning light.

From the days when this part of Liberty Avenue was mostly warehouses and light industry, this building, nicely restored, shows how much effort once went into ornamenting at least the front even of a utilitarian commercial structure.

Though it currently houses a real-estate agency, the terra-cotta reliefs tell us that this was built as a medical office. The splendid Art Deco eagle made it a very patriotic medical office.



A decorative panel on a building on Forbes Avenue seems to capture the spirit of medieval decoration filtered through an Art Deco lens.