For the first time since the boom of the 1980s, two skyscrapers are going up at once downtown. The Tower at PNC Plaza has topped out, and Tower Two-Sixty at The Gardens is rising on Forbes Avenue just up the street from the Diamond. We can see one of the cranes and a bit of the skeleton of the latter between two of the Fourth Avenue bank towers.
Taken from the same vantage point as our previous pictures of the Smithfield Street Bridge, but a little later in the day.
Another experiment in panorama stitching, this time from the Station Square parking lot.
Sub-zero temperatures have formed patches of ice in the Monongahela.
Here it is, for no other reason than that Father Pitt was trying out the in-camera panorama stitching in his Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS. It seems to work well, within its limits: it reduces the resolution of the individual pictures, so that the overall panorama is about 10 megapixels, whereas an individual picture is saved at 14-megapixel resolution. But even at the smaller size, the final picture is large and detailed: click on it to enlarge it to full size.
Opened in 1914, this splendid little movie palace, renamed for two of East Liberty’s biggest stars, is now a venue for live performances. The architect was Harry S. Bair, who designed several theaters in the area and also designed the old Dormont Municipal Building, which is now the home of the Anne Gregory bridal shop.
The modernist ideal: towers in a park. It works here better than it works almost anywhere else it has been tried. The architects, incidentally, were the firm of Eggers & Higgins, who were the successors to John Russell Pope.
Old Pa Pitt decided to make this picture look as much as possible like an architect’s rendering. He was trying out the LightZone photo software, which will take some getting used to. For correcting lens distortion, he used the GIMP.
Another view of the Allegheny station, this time from the Carnegie Science Center. A rush-hour two-car train is waiting on the platform.
The subway is free all the way from here under the Allegheny and through to First Avenue on the other side of downtown Pittsburgh. The extension of the free zone to the North Side is sponsored by the Stadium Authority and the Rivers Casino, so old Pa Pitt cannot in good conscience say that gambling never did anything for him. He still has never set foot in the casino, but he is grateful for the free ride.
