Father Pitt

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Wood Street Station

Two colliding grids make up downtown Pittsburgh’s street layout, and the collision happens at Liberty Avenue, giving us a fine array of odd-shaped buildings. This triangular structure, built as a bank, now houses the Wood Street subway station below and the Wood Street Galleries, an important contemporary art gallery, on the upper floors.

While the Gateway Center Station is closed, Wood Street is the terminus of the subway downtown.

This picture was taken with a Kiev-4 camera, a Ukrainian rangefinder that Father Pitt loves with an unreasoning passion. He would like to state for the record that the hideously rusted car in the foreground is not his fault.

November 18, 2009
Inside the City-County Building

The interior of Henry Hornbostel’s City-County Building is designed on the model of a Roman basilica. It’s an excellent example of architecture as message, conveying the idea that your local government, powerful and benevolent, is at your service. It’s also a very practical interior, with the large central hall making it easy to cover the short distances between the most important departments of government. That’s a very good thing, because everyone knows that any dealing with city or county government will inevitably involve visits to at least three separate offices.

November 13, 2009
Phipps by Night

Phipps Conservatory is open Friday evenings until 10 p.m. The darkness and the relatively few visitors can sometimes give one the eerie sensation of being lost in a jungle filled with surrealistic Fräbel glass art.

November 10, 2009
William Pitt, First Earl of Chatham

This dashing young fellow is William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham and your humble servant, as he is represented in the City-County Building.

November 8, 2009
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

November 8, 2009
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.

November 6, 2009
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.

November 5, 2009
Fifth Avenue Place by Night

Looking up at Fifth Avenue Place from the intersection of Forbes and Stanwix.

November 4, 2009
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.

November 3, 2009
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.)

November 2, 2009