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Andrew Peebles, who also designed St. Peter’s on the North Side, designed this church, which was quite large when it was built but looks like a toy next to the skyscrapers of Grant Street. Built in 1887, it is now the oldest building on the street.

A few details of the Union Trust Building, designed by Pierre A. Liesch when he was working for Frederick Osterling—at least according to Liesch; the building is usually just credited to Osterling.




The octagonal rotunda of the Allegheny County Jail, designed by H. H. Richardson.

Urban legend says that these structures are chapels where the privileged can repent of their sins, but in fact they house the elevator mechanics and other rooftop necessities.

Of all the hundreds of lions on buildings downtown, the Romanesque lions that guard the county courthouse are the most distinctive. They used to be at street level, but the lowering of the Hump, the awkward hill that used to make navigating downtown even more difficult than it is now, left them stranded far above pedestrians’ heads.

In theory there is no reason to take digital pictures in black and white, since they can always be desaturated later. In practice, knowing that the picture will never have any colors in it makes one think more in terms of lines and shadows. Here are two pictures taken with a camera from the Neolithic era of digital cameras, which Father Pitt keeps set to black-and-white mode.
