Father Pitt

Tag: Grant Street

  • Grant Street in 2000

    Grant Street in 2000

    Photographed on Elite Chrome 100 film with a Kodak Retinette.

  • Grant Building from First Avenue

    Grant Building

    When Henry Hornbostel’s Grant Building first went up in 1929, it was festooned with Art Deco pinnacles that were removed decades ago. If you enlarge this picture of the south side of the building, you can just make out the shadows left by those vanished ornaments.

  • One Oxford Centre from First Avenue

    Designed by the huge international firm Hellmuth, Obata, & Kassabaum, this nest of octagons was one of many landmark skyscrapers that popped up like mushrooms in the boom of the 1980s.

  • Fortune and Her Wheel

    This window by the celebrated stained-glass master John La Farge looks out over the lobby of the Frick Building. The metaphor of Fortune’s wheel is an odd one for a self-made gazillionaire to choose: Henry Frick was not known for his modesty, and yet the message seems to be that he was just lucky rather than clever.

  • Lobby of the Frick Building

    Everything in the Frick Building is gleaming white marble, with just enough accents to keep the interior from becoming entirely invisible. Above, the staircase at the Grant Street entrance. Below, the revolving doors and clock at the Grant Street entrance.

    The lobby is shaped like a T, with a hall from the Grant Street entrance ending at the long hall from Forbes Avenue to Fifth Avenue, seen here from the Forbes Avenue entrance.

    Even Henry Frick himself is gleaming white marble, rendered by the well-known sculptor Malvina Hoffman in 1923.

  • One Oxford Centre (and a Lamppost)

    Seen from First Avenue across Firstside Park.

  • Lion on the Allegheny County Courthouse

    Romanesque lions guard the Allegheny County Courthouse. They would originally have been at street level before Grant Street was lowered by about a storey.

  • One Oxford Centre

    One Oxford Centre is a cluster of octagons put up during the 1980s construction boom downtown. In fact it was to have an even taller partner next to it, but that never materialized before the boom went bust. The architects were the firm of Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, now known as HOK, currently the biggest architectural firm in the United States.

  • Forbes Avenue Side of the Frick Building

    Louis Sullivan was of the opinion that Daniel Burnham’s success in the classical style was a great blow to American architecture. But what could be more American than a Burnham skyscraper? Like America, it melds its Old World influences into an entirely new form, in its way as harmonious and dignified as a Roman basilica, but without qualification distinctly American.

  • Reliefs on the City-County Building

    On the left, the arms of Allegheny County; on the right, the arms of the City of Pittsburgh.

    Allegheny County.

    Pittsburgh.

    Addendum: The sculptures are by Charles Keck, who also worked with architect Henry Hornbostel on numerous other buildings, including Soldiers and Sailors Hall.