Tag: Fifth Avenue

  • Willis McCook Mansion, Shadyside

    You can make good money as a lawyer if you make the right contacts. Willis McCook was lawyer to the robber barons, and he lived among them in this splendid Gothic mansion on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row. The architects were the local firm of Carpenter & Crocker. It is now a hotel called the “Mansions on Fifth,” along with the house around the corner that McCook built for his daughter and son-in-law.

  • Litchfield Towers, Oakland

    Two of the three cylindrical skyscraper dormitories poetically named A, B, and C by the University of Pittsburgh, but popularly known as Ajax, Bab-O, and Comet.

  • Buses on Fifth Avenue

    Old Pa Pitt is a transit extremist. He believes in a subway between downtown and Oakland, and nothing less. But the “bus rapid transit” now in progress will certainly be an enormous improvement over what we have now, which is herds of buses getting stuck in inbound Fifth Avenue traffic. Here we see them piled up in front of the fancy new Atwood Street station.

  • Central Catholic High School

    Central Catholic

    A kind of cartoon castle, the main building of Central Catholic is technically in Squirrel Hill, though most Pittsburghers would probably say “Oakland.” The building was put up in 1927; the architect was Edward J. Weber.

  • View Down Fifth Avenue in Oakland

    Fifth Avenue, Oakland

    Decades from now, some curious soul exploring the back corners of archived Internet content will come across this picture and spin an elaborate theory of exactly what it was we were going to get through together. Possibly Fifth Avenue traffic, which is unusually moderate in this picture, but minutes later was brought to a standstill by a truck that decided to stop diagonally across the entire boulevard and unload its cargo.

  • Tower of Bellefield Presbyterian Church

    Tower of Bellefield Presbyterian Church and Bellefield Towers

    The church was pulled down to make way for an office block, but the tower was left to preside over its old corner.

  • Fifth Avenue, Oakland

    A picture taken back in February, but held in reserve (or forgotten about) till now: looking west on Fifth Avenue in the Oakland monument district. On this side is the Fifth Avenue bus lane, soon to be integrated into the new Oakland BRT line; across the street is a corner of the Masonic Temple (now Alumni Hall) and the Pittsburgh Athletic Association under renovation.

  • Kaufmann’s Clock from Fifth Avenue

    The famous Kaufmann’s clock, seen from the east on Fifth Avenue.

  • Regal Shoe Company

    This oddly domestic-looking storefront is made for a high-class tenant, and has found the perfect match in Heinz Healey’s haberdashery. The building was designed by Alden & Harlow, whose usual good taste is apparent.

  • Fifth Wood Building

    This is classicism walking the knife edge between Art Deco on the one side and modernism on the other. The architect was George H. Schwan, a Pittsburgher whose only other major commission in town that old Pa Pitt knows about is the Twentieth Century Club in Oakland. [Update: The Twentieth Century Club is usually attributed to Benno Janssen. Schwan may also have designed the Natatorium Building in Oakland, or the renovations that made it into a movie theater.] Schwan did not starve, however: he was a much-employed designer of attractive smaller houses, and his most famous commission was designing practically all the original buildings in the model Akron suburb of Goodyear Heights.

    Addendum: Father Pitt knows of more works by Schwan than he did when he wrote this article. See the Great Big List of Buildings and Architects for old Pa Pitt’s latest research.