Father Pitt

Tag: Apartment Buildings

  • The Aberdeen

    The Aberdeen

    An apartment building in the graceful form of a Renaissance palace.

  • Bayard Manor

    Bayard Manor

    A Tudor Gothic apartment block in North Oakland whose details are worth pausing to appreciate.

  • The Fairfax

    The Fairfax, Oakland, Pittsburgh

    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.

  • Try Street Terminal (First Avenue Side)

    Try Street Terminal

    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.

  • Grandview Avenue, Duquesne Heights

    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.

  • River Vue Apartments with Fall Colors

    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.

  • Chatham Center

    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.

  • Lumière Residences

    The Lumière, the latest luxury condo tower downtown, is currently going up where Saks Fifth Avenue used to be, at Smithfield Street and Oliver Avenue.

  • Tower Two-Sixty

    Tower Two-Sixty on Forbes Avenue, seen from the northwest.

  • River Vue Apartments

    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.