Father Pitt

Tag: 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.

  • Warner Theatre Sign

    The Warner was one of the great silent-movie palaces downtown, but it had the misfortune to be placed far from the theater district along Penn Avenue. In the 1980s most of it was demolished for a shopping arcade, leaving the classical façade on Fifth Avenue and the distinctive lighted sign, with the word “Theatre” replaced by “Centre,” because the shopping-arcade and movie-theater industries share an assumption that British spellings attract more customers. The shopping arcade, like most arcades downtown, gradually transitioned to mostly offices. But the sign still dominates the view down Fifth Avenue.

  • A Very Tall Building for 1888

    The Hamilton Building stood at 91 and 93 Fifth Avenue, which, if the addresses are the same, would put it right about where the May Building is now. The owner, a dealer in pianos and cottage organs, was obviously very proud of its astounding height. But the skyscraper age was about to begin, and in a few years this would be just another inconsiderable storefront downtown, soon to be replaced by a skyscraper itself.

    Source: Allegheny County: Its Early History and Subsequent Development, 1888.

  • 242 Fifth Avenue

    This ostentatious little building on Fifth Avenue is in need of some restoration. Something could be done with the ground floor to make it more in sympathy with the upper storeys without spending the immense fortune it would probably take to recreate the original classical front. Even a simple modernist glass front would be more harmonious.

  • Cast-Iron Front on Fifth Avenue

    Restored a few years ago, this is a fine example of a Victorian cast-iron façade.

  • Grotesque Face on Fifth Avenue

    This small piece of the old façade sticks up over the undistinguished tiles that cover the rest of this Fifth Avenue building. It must have been quite a façade when we could see the rest of it.

  • Wreath at the Fifth Avenue Place Arcade

    Fifth Avenue Place replaced the beloved Jenkins Arcade, and in order to soothe the feelings of appalled Pittsburghers the new skyscraper included a shopping arcade in the lower floors, connected by a pedestrian bridge to the Horne’s department store. It was very successful early on, and even now, with Horne’s long gone, it manages to keep most of the storefronts filled. For Christmas the colossal clock over the Liberty Avenue entrance is surrounded by a colossal wreath.

  • Base of the Tower at PNC Plaza

    The base of earth’s greenest skyscraper, as it called itself when it was going up, is all shiny curves and lights and reflections.

  • Decorations on the Buhl Building

    The Buhl Building on Fifth Avenue, one of Benno Janssen’s earlier works, is covered with terra-cotta reliefs in Wedgwood colors.