Father Pitt

Tag: Fifth Avenue

  • Regal Shoe Company Building

    Regal Shoe Company

    Designed by Alden & Harlow and built in 1908, this deliberately quaint little store has held up well.

    Entrance
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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  • Corner Building on Fifth Avenue

    214 Fifth Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    Father Pitt does not know the story of this building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and McMasters Way. The great G. C. Murphy downtown empire, “the world’s largest variety store,” slopped into it as it expanded, and by bad luck and misunderstanding the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque for the main Art Deco Murphy’s building (designed by Harold E. Crosby in 1930) ended up on the front of this building instead. Whatever this building was originally, it’s obviously much older than 1930. Updates to the ground floor have been handled with good taste, and the entrance is still on the corner. Old Pa Pitt approves of corner entrances.

  • Fifth Wood Building

    Fifth Wood Building
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    George Schwan was the architect of this building, according to a city architectural survey. Its modernistic classicism makes it a good neighbor to a wide variety of architectural styles. From a distance, it gives us the impression of an all-stone building, but in fact the effect is achieved with a carefully balanced mixture of terra-cotta tiles and stone-colored brick.

    More pictures of the Fifth Wood Building.

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  • Chatham Tower

    Chatham Tower
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    An apartment tower that was part of the original Chatham Center complex, designed by William Lescaze with Pittsburgh’s Harry Lefkowitz as the local architect. It opened in 1966.

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  • Allegheny County Courthouse

    Allegheny County Courthouse
    Samsung Digimax V4.

    From the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue (and try to explain that to an out-of-towner).

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  • Chatham Two

    Two Chatham Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman, a firm that began in Butler and grew to be an international architectural titan, would become famous in the middle 1980s for postmodernist buildings like Liberty Center. This building, however, is prepostmodernist. It opened in 1981, and it is a straightforward modernist box with a Miesian look. Although it doesn’t arrest our attention the way some of the firm’s later projects do, it was a harbinger of Renaissance II, the building boom of the 1980s that remodeled Pittsburgh with a postmodernist skyline.

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  • Lantern on the Frick Building

    Lantern on the Frick Building
    Lantern on the Frick Building
    Lantern on the Frick Building
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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  • Ornamental Bronze on the Frick Building

    Ornaments over the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Frick Building
    Kodak Easyshare Z990.

    Ornamental patterns, including a fine Vitruvian scroll (the wave pattern in the middle), over the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Frick Building.

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  • Kaufmann’s Clock

    Kaufmann’s clock

    First put up in 1913 (replacing a clock on a post that had stood here earlier), the Kaufmann’s clock is one of the famous sights of Pittsburgh. It keeps time, too.

    Face of atlas
    Atlas
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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  • Fifth Avenue Portal, Allegheny County Courthouse

    Fifth Avenue portal, Allegheny County Courthouse
    Samsung Digimax V4.

    This impressive portal, wide enough to drive a large delivery wagon through, leads to the central courtyard.

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