Father Pitt

Tag: Diamond

  • The Largest Antebellum Building Downtown (Probably)

    2 Market Square

    This building was probably put up shortly after the Great Fire of 1845, to judge from the fact that it appears in an engraving of the Diamond as it was before 1852. Few buildings from before the Civil War are left downtown, and this is almost certainly the largest.

    View of the Diamond before 1852
    “Old Pittsburgh Court House and Market. Taken down 1852.” Source: Allegheny County: Its Early History and Subsequent Development. By Rev. A. A. Lambing, LL. D., and Hon. J. W. F. White. Pittsburgh: Snowden & Peterson, 1888.

    The building in the engraving is not quite the right dimensions, but the engraver (at the firm of John C. Bragdon, Pittsburgh’s busiest engravers) was probably working from hasty sketches.

    Note the volutes and incised decorations in the lintels over the windows, bringing the building up to date with the latest trends in Greek Revival style.

    Window
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • West Side of the Diamond

    West side of the Diamond
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    The west side of the Diamond or Market Square, seen from Graeme Street.

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  • Nicholas Building

    If you see a student of architecture suddenly stop in the middle of the Diamond and burst out laughing, this building is the subject of the mirth.

    When it was announced that a gigantic complex to be designed by Philip Johnson was going to take over one corner of the Diamond, the owners of the Nicholas Coffee building, who happened to be ready for a renovation, decided to welcome their new neighbor with a parody of what was then Johnson’s most famous work. At that time, Johnson was notorious everywhere for his AT&T Building (now called just 550 Madison Avenue), which was a deliberate poke in the eye of orthodox modernism; and you have only to see it to get the Nicholas Building’s joke.

    Photograph by David Shankbone; cropped by Beyond My Ken.

  • 8 Market Square

    8 Market Square

    This building on the Diamond has lost its cornice, but the rest of it is intact, and the details are worth a closer look.

    Eagle

  • 2 Market Square

    Pittsburgh dates from 1758, but downtown has prospered and burned and been rebuilt and prospered and decayed and prospered again so much that little remains from before the Civil War. This is one of the few survivors from the antebellum era: it was built before 1852, to judge from old engravings.

  • G. C. Murphy Buildings

    G. C. Murphy buildings

    It called itself “the world’s largest variety store,” and it was probably right about that. G. C. Murphy was a big chain of five-and-dime stores based in McKeesport, but the downtown Pittsburgh store was its biggest and most exciting. It had three floors of everything, including concessions rented out to everything from produce vendors to fortune tellers. The whole establishment occupied the corner of Forbes Avenue and the Diamond and went through the block to Fifth Avenue.

    The chain succumbed to corporate raiders in the 1980s, who exploited quirks of capitalist logic by driving the chain into bankruptcy and getting rich in the process. The downtown store contracted into a small part of its former empire, and then closed altogether.

    For a while the buildings sat empty. Now they have been restored to beautiful condition, and the Diamond is thriving again. Old Pa Pitt wishes he could have Murphy’s back, but time like an ever-rolling stream and all that.

  • Tower Two-Sixty

    Tower Two-Sixty

    The blockish Tower Two-Sixty looms over the little human-sized buildings on the Diamond.

  • Fifth Avenue Place from the Diamond

    Fifth Avenue Place looms over the DFiamond

    Fifth Avenue Place looms over the low human-sized buildings on the Diamond.

  • View Across the Diamond

    View across the Diamond

    A wintry view across the Diamond or Market Square, with the Pittsburgh National Bank Building (One PNC Plaza), the U. S. Steel Tower, the Tower at PNC Plaza, and Tower Two-Sixty looming behind the square.

  • Three Gateway Center from the Diamond

    Three Gateway Center looms in the mist of a winter morning.