The Arrott Building is the most lavishly ornamented of the Fourth Avenue bank towers. The ornaments near the top may be best appreciated from another one of the Fourth Avenue bank towers—or with a very long lens from the street.
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Queen Anne’s Lace Gone to Seed
The ubiquitous Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) is very decorative in flower, but its seed heads are also picturesque in their way. The umbel of flowers closes up into a something very like a bird’s nest, where hundreds of bristly seeds develop to produce the Queen Anne’s Lace for the year after next (it’s a biennial, so it flowers the second year).
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Morning Glories
Morning glories (Ipomoea purpurea) came here as ornamental garden flowers and have happily adapted to the life of a weed. They are, however, one of our most beautiful weeds, and not many of us resent them. These were blooming in Beechview at the end of August.
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Carnegie Library, South Side Branch
Alden and Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects, designed this branch library, as they did many others. This one opened in 1909.
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The History Behind the Façade
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.
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Courtyard of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club
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.
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Triangle Building
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.
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The Great Fire of Pittsburgh, 1845
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)
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McArdle Roadway Railing
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.
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Roberto Clemente Bridge
The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente Bridge, looking toward the North Side, in glorious black and white.
