A panoramic view of the Walled Garden. Mellon Park was originally the Mellons’ back yard; the Walled Garden was designed by the landscape architects Vitale and Geiffert.
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The Walled Garden in Mellon Park
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Trillium Time on the Trillium Trail
The Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel is named for the vast drifts of trilliums that grow in the woods there. There are two species: the Great White Trillium, Trillium grandiflorum, and the Wake-Robin, Trillium erectum. The Great White is, as you might expect, white (though occasionally pale pink); the Wake-Robin has several color forms, of which red is the usual in most of its range, but white dominates in the Pittsburgh area.
Father Pitt’s best pictures of wildflowers always end up at Flora Pittsburghensis, which you should certainly see right now if you like spring flowers.
Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum).
White, red, pink, and yellow forms of the Wake-Robin (Trillium erectum).
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Two PNC Plaza
Not one of our most famous or most distinguished buildings, but big: this is the thirteenth-tallest building in Pittsburgh—the twelfth-tallest downtown (leaving out the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland). It opened in 1976 as Equibank Plaza, and ended up in the hands of PNC after many mergers and acquisitions. Since PNC calls this “Two PNC Plaza,” its own current headquarters “One PNC Plaza,” the mixed-use skyscraper at the foot of Fifth Avenue “Three PNC Plaza,” and its new signature skyscraper “The Tower at PNC Plaza,” old Pa Pitt is forced to conclude that PNC thinks of the whole Golden Triangle as “PNC Plaza.”
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Tower Two-Sixty
For the first time since the 1980s, downtown Pittsburgh has two skyscrapers going up at once (the other being the Tower at PNC Plaza). The project was begun as “the Gardens at Market Square,” but became “Tower Two-Sixty” at about the time construction began. The skeleton has risen, and now the skin begins to take shape.
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Fiddlehead
It requires very little imagination to see why young fern leaves are called “fiddleheads.” This one was unrolling in late April along the Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel.
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William Penn Hotel
Here we see the William Penn Place side of the William Penn Hotel. The Grant Street front presents a solid wall to the street, but this side is divided by two light wells, which are necessary in a building that takes up a whole city block. The arched bridges connecting the upper floors are graceful touches that add to the apparent unity of the design, which is the work of Benno Janssen, one of Pittsburgh’s favorite architects for many years..
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Belmar Theater, Homewood
This movie house was newly built in 1915, when this picture was published. It was open until the late 1960s; it was torn down in the 1970s.
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Dallmeyer Building, Liberty Avenue
The Dallmeyer Building spent decades behind a nondescript modernist façade until a few years ago, when the modern accretions were ripped off to reveal this perfect gem behind them.
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Wooded Hillside, Mount Lebanon
A last glimpse of bare trees; in a week or so they will all have leafed out.
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Oliver Building
Henry W. Oliver wanted to leave a mark on Pittsburgh, and he certainly did. Virgin Alley was renamed Oliver Avenue, and he planned this building to be the tallest in Pittsburgh. It was the tallest when it opened in 1910, although Oliver himself didn’t live to see it finished. As architect, he hired Daniel Burnham, the great Chicago beaux-arts master for whom Pittsburgh was practically a second home—there are more Burnham buildings here than anywhere else but Chicago.
