This modest apartment building (it looks as though the ground floor used to be a store) is enlivened by interesting brickwork.
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Apartment Building, 17th and Sarah Streets, South Side
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King Edward Apartments
This splendid apartment block in Oakland occupies an awkward plot. The intersection is not precisely perpendicular, which means the plot is not precisely rectangular. The architect has attacked this problem by making a staggered façade along Craig Street, skillfully manipulating the ornamentation so that it appears to be more symmetrical than it is. In this picture, the ground floor—given over to retail shops—is being renovated.
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Hampton Hall
The Tudor style adapts itself to an apartment building with some success. Old Pa Pitt can’t keep himself from wondering whether there are actually apartments up there under those peaked roofs with the dormers. Most of the Tudor atmosphere is in the detailing of the stone, but we have a few cartoonish suggestions of half-timbering just so nobody mistakes the style for anything else.
Addendum: According to the city architectural inventory (PDF), Hampton Hall was built in 1928.
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D’Arlington Apartments, Oakland
Edward Keen was the architect of this intriguing apartment building on the edge of Oakland, just where it meets Shadyside. It was built in 1910, and the style seems to old Pa Pitt to be something like Italian Renaissance fading through Prairie Style to modernism. It has the simplicity and squareness of all three styles; the details are subtle but rich (especially the cornice); and the inset balconies, with much effort put into preventing them from breaking the lines of the rectangular walls, presage the simplicity-at-all-costs of the modernists.
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Webster Hall
A full view of the Fifth Avenue façade of Webster Hall. The design is by Henry Hornbostel, who successfully created a conservative Art Deco classicism that harmonizes with the other grand monuments on Fifth Avenue.
The building was apparently put up as fancy bachelor apartments, but soon became a grand hotel (it is now apartments again). It was famous for the Webster Hall Cake, whose secret recipe is still treasured by little old ladies all over Pittsburgh. But old Pa Pitt is delighted to discover that the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle has a whole article on Webster Hall Cake, including two recipes that claim to be close approximations. Father Pitt suspects that there are still little old ladies out there who claim to have the real thing, but these recipes are a good start.
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The Adrian
Another elegant Renaissance palace, slightly smaller but very similar in style to the Aberdeen. Once again, the view is marred by intrusive utility cables.
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The Aberdeen
An apartment building in the graceful form of a Renaissance palace.
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Bayard Manor
A Tudor Gothic apartment block in North Oakland whose details are worth pausing to appreciate.
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The Fairfax
Note that the full picture is more than 45 megapixels.
Apartment life was never as much of a big thing in Pittsburgh as it was in some other big Eastern cities, but the corner of Oakland next to Shadyside is mostly given over to large blocks of apartments like this. The Fairfax affects an English style; old Pa Pitt does not know whose arms are on the façade, but they do not seem to be the arms of Lord Fairfax.
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Try Street Terminal (First Avenue Side)
This is the First Avenue side of a building that occupies a whole block—or arguably more, since the little alley Gasoline Street runs right through the middle of it. Built as a utilitarian warehouse, it was repurposed as a dormitory for the Art Institute; and when that school was in its final death spiral, the building was refurbished again as—of course—luxury lofts, under the name Terminal 21.
