Duquesne Heights is the western section of Mount Washington, the part that includes the expensive restaurants overlooking the skyline and the luxury apartment towers. Here we see Grandview Pointe in the foreground, with its glass-walled elevator shaft leading up to the Monterey Bay Fish Grotto, and the Trimont in the distance.
The former State Office Building, now (like everything else) luxury apartments, with the fall colors of Gateway Plaza in front. At lower right, a yellow-vested man is working on the garden in the median of Liberty Avenue.
This picture from five years ago (but old Pa Pitt just dug it out of his archive, where it lay forgotten) shows the unobstructed view of Chatham Center from the Middle Hill. Chatham One is the building with the name at the top; the square tower to the left of it is Two Chatham Center.
The former State Office Building was designed by the firm of Altenhof and Bown (also responsible for the 1964 Federal Building on Grant Street; otherwise they seem to have specialized in schools). There was some grumbling when the state sold the building to private developers to be turned into luxury apartments, since space had to be found for the state employees, and some analyses suggested that the state would spend far more on leasing space than it would have spent on renovating the building. But it is certainly a first-rate location for apartments.
This interesting residential-commercial structure on Potomac Avenue seems to combine two styles. The apartment building is a kind of very late Italianate, but the way the projecting storefronts form a sort of courtyard seems very much in the Mission style, as do the sloped roofs, which old Pa Pitt suspects were originally tile rather than asphalt shingles.
Dormont, a little borough on the southern border of Pittsburgh, is a pleasant place, and surprisingly densely populated. It’s number 62 on the list of United States cities by population density—more densely populated, for example, than Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, or Miami. That’s all the more remarkable because Dormont has no tall buildings to speak of. It’s mostly made up of row after row of densely packed single-family homes. But there are also a fair number of small apartment buildings like these, and many of them make up what they lack in architectural distinctiveness with brickwork in decorative patterns. These two buildings face each other across Voelkel Avenue.
Webster Hall was designed by Henry Hornbostel, Pittsburgh’s favorite architect in the early twentieth century. It was built as a luxury hotel [Update: in fact it was originally bachelor apartments, but that venture soon failed, and it was converted to a hotel] in 1926, and we can see Hornbostel moving from his flamboyant classical style (as exemplified in the City-County Building) to a sort of restrained Art Deco.
This is not the largest but one of the most splendid apartment buildings in the North Oakland apartment district. It is a curious trapezoidal shape, crammed into a lot that is not quite rectangular and using up every inch of it.
There are some stitching errors in this very large composite photograph, and old Pa Pitt is too lazy to fix them.
