Tag: Fort Pitt Boulevard

  • Firstside

    Firstside from Mount Washington

    A large composite picture (it’s 8,911 × 2,319 pixels if you enlarge it) of the row of buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard in the Firstside Historic District. Before the boulevards isolated the city from the shore, these buildings used to face the Monongahela Wharf, a chaotically busy inland port where steamboats by the dozens loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargo.

  • Firstside

    Firstside

    The little human-sized buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard originally faced the Monongahela Wharf, where the steamboats lined up.

    Firstside
  • Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse

    Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse

    A particularly elegant Romanesque warehouse built for the company that made bathroom plumbing fashion-conscious. Standard later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard, still a leader in toilet technology today. The building is now luxurious offices under the name “Fort Pitt Commons.” According to the boundary-increase application for the Firstside Historic district, it was built 1900–1905; the architect is unknown, which is a pity, because it was obviously someone with a real sense of rhythm in architecture. (If you backed old Pa Pitt into a corner and asked him to guess the architect, he might say Charles Bickel, whose Reymer Brothers candy factory Uptown is very similar in many details, including the treatment of the arches.) Above, the side that faces Fort Pitt Boulevard and the Mon; below, the First Avenue side.