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.
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.
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.
