This dashing young fellow is William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham and your humble servant, as he is represented in the City-County Building.
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Fallowfield Viaduct
Late-afternoon sun catches a Route 42C train headed inbound across Dagmar Avenue on the Fallowfield Viaduct in Beechview. In rush hour, two-car trains run on all routes except 52. Route 42C will soon be the Red Line, according to the Transit Development Plan
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CNG Tower
Construction can reveal previously impossible views. Here we see the whole CNG tower from top to bottom, a 1980s postmodernist palace that presents radically different—but still harmonious—faces from different angles.
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Allegorical History of Pittsburgh Civic Architecture
The elevator doors in the City-County Building give us an allegorical history of the growth of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County and their civic buildings, ending with the current courthouse and the City-County Building itself.
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Fifth Avenue Place by Night
Looking up at Fifth Avenue Place from the intersection of Forbes and Stanwix.
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Last Glimpses of Gateway Center Station
Father Pitt found time for a few last pictures of Gateway Center just hours before the station closed forever. In two years or so, we’ll have a big new station, but old Pa Pitt will still secretly miss the little old one just a bit.
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Gateway Center Mural by Romare Bearden
“Pittsburgh Recollections,” installed when the Gateway Center station opened in the middle 1980s, takes us from canoes down the Allegheny to these marvelous modern mainframe computers with their gigantic reel-to-reel tape drives full of data, by way of the French and Indian War, Conestoga wagons, the riverboat era, a banjo that doubtless accompanied songs by Stephen Foster, and the age of steel. The Port Authority is raising money to have the mural restored and reinstalled at the new Gateway Center station. (UPDATE: The mural has been restored and reinstalled at Gateway station.)
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Cemeteries for All Souls’ Eve
What better way to remember all the saints than with a few of Father Pitt’s favorite cemetery pictures?
The Becker memorial in an old German cemetery in Beechview.
A model of the Pantheon, at only slightly reduced scale, in the Allegheny Cemetery.
An octagonal Gothic mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery.
A row of tombstones in the Allegheny Cemetery takes on an air of mystery, thanks to a seventy-year-old lens.
The door of the Winter mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery shows Mr. Winter as an Egyptian pharaoh about to depart for his journey to the underworld.
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End of the Line for Gateway Center
A kind reader who signs himself “Matt” had an excellent suggestion:
Any interest in photographing or featuring the old Gateway Center Station one last time before it closes forever this weekend?
It was never a beautiful or impressive space, but of our trio of odd underground stations, Gateway Center was the oddest. It will soon be replaced by a gleaming new station that will doubtless be more convenient and more beautiful. But old Pa Pitt confesses that he was always sneakily proud of the old Gateway Center station when he brought out-of-town visitors downtown. They might come from cities with more expensive or more comprehensive subway systems, but few subway stations are as just plain weird as Gateway Center was. Notice, for example, the low-level platform, now closed off by a rail, that was built to accommodate the old PCC cars when they still ran the Overbrook route—a feature shared by all three of the underground stations downtown.
The weirdest aspect of Gateway Center, of course, was the loop. Visitors riding the subway for the first time were always alarmed to see the station they wanted flashing by on their left, as though the car had somehow just missed it. Then came the long squealy loop that threw everybody to the right-hand side of the car, and finally the car re-emerged into the station, this time with the platform on the right side.
We’ll see more pictures of the old Gateway Center station shortly. Meanwhile, the subway ends at Wood Street until further notice, except for the next few weekends, when it ends at First Avenue.
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Griffin at the Pittsburgh Zoo
If you know where to look (up the hill by the educational buildings) you can find a pair of bronze griffins among the exotic fauna at the Pittsburgh Zoo.