The Diamond Building is by MacClure and Spahr, who skillfully met the challenge of a dauntingly irregular site by filling it with a building that looks as if it’s meant to be this shape. It was originally the headquarters of the Diamond Bank, whose logo can still be seen in metal grates at ground level.
Many of the interior details are preserved inside the Diamond Building. Here we look down the stairwell with its ornate railings.
When the New Urbanist SouthSide Works development was built, the Town Square here on Sidney Street was clearly meant to be its retail heart. But it also lined a previously empty stretch of Carson Street with new storefronts in architecture cleverly echoing, without imitating, the Victorian shops of the old South Side. In effect, it extended the prosperous Carson Street business district a few more blocks. The result has been that the Carson Street side prospers, while the Town Square has had some trouble filling vacant storefronts. Nevertheless, the prosperity of Carson Street, as it continues to grow, should leach into the Town Square.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A540.
Tower Two-Sixty in downtown Pittsburgh, seen from the Diamond or Market Square on a Thursday, when the farmer’s market is in session.
The west side of the Diamond or Market Square, looking down Graeme Street toward Fifth Avenue.
The only way to get a complete view of the Grant Street front of the Union Trust Building is with a composite of several photos. There are stitching errors, including a spooky phantom wheel rolling down Grant Street, but at least the picture gives us a better idea than we usually get of the face of this massive building, which was intended by Henry Frick to be the best shopping arcade in the country. It was designed in the Flemish Gothic style by Frederick Osterling.
No tree celebrates fall more enthusiastically than Liquidambar styraciflua, the North American sweetgum. Pittsburgh is a little north of its native range, but it has been adopted everywhere as a favorite urban planting. In the fall, its leaves turn every color of which autumn leaves are capable, all on the same tree—from bright yellow to the deepest eggplant purple.
No one seems to know who the sculptor was, but this 1890 portrait of mourning and consolation is one of the best things in the cemetery. The leaves help, of course.
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