This building was put up between 1903 and 1910, and that is all old Pa Pitt knows about it. The extra-tall third floor looks like a lodge meeting hall, but it does not appear on maps as a lodge. The ground floor was a bank for many years. The building is going through a thorough renovation now, including new windows all around, fortunately the right size for the window openings.
Pearl Street is not quite perpendicular to Liberty Avenue, so this building has the common Pittsburgh problem of an obtuse angle to solve. You might not notice the solution unless you look closely.
For about a century and a third, this church was one of the main centers of life in Bloomfield. Now that all the Catholic churches in Bloomfield are closed, incredible as it may seem in our most Italian neighborhood, an Italian Catholic who lives in Bloomfield cannot walk to Mass without making a serious expedition of it.
The church was built in 1886; the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks foundation attributes it to Adolf or Adolphus Druiding, who also designed Ss. Peter and Paul in Larimer/East Liberty. However, an expert in the works of E. G. W. Dietrich (see the comment below) was kind enough to correct that attribution. The church was designed by the partnership of Bartberger & Dietrich, as we learn both from an article at the laying of the cornerstone and an illustration of the church in the Builder and Wood-Worker for June, 1889, where it is attributed to Bartberger alone. Charles M. Bartberger and E. G. W. Dietrich were partners for about three years, from 1883 to 1886, before Dietrich moved to New York, which he seems to have done while this church was under construction. Father Pitt has updated his attribution based on this evidence, with many thanks to our correspondent.
These little stores with living quarters above were built in the 1880s, but the buildings are not much different from thousands that went up throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed they have their stylistic roots in the eighteenth century. They all preserve their properly inset shop entrances, so that doors do not hit passing pedestrians in the face.
This is a rather grandly named bus station and parking garage. It’s certainly a striking building to look at; it was designed by IKM, descended from the grand old firm of Ingham & Boyd. There ought to be someone in the crow’s nest at the top of the tower to shout “Bus ho!” whenever a Greyhound is sighted.
Penn and Liberty Avenues are living museums of Victorian downtown architecture: in very few other places can we get such a vivid impression of what a big city looked like in Victorian times before the age of skyscrapers began. From old maps, we can see that this splendid building appears to have been put up in the 1880s for one W. T. Shannon, who was still the owner in 1923. The upper floors are now loft apartments.
To judge by old maps, this splendid cast-iron-fronted building was put up in the 1880s for William Carr, and it remained in the Carr family for decades after that. These days the details are picked out in shades of pale blue.
Old Pa Pitt nursed a secret grudge against this building for years, for the very petty reason that it replaced the old Aldine Theatre, which he had hoped to see restored as part of the revival of the theater district downtown. But on its own merits, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center is a striking building that makes the most of its triangular site, and certainly no Pittsburgher better deserves the naming rights to the first theater to meet our eyes on Liberty Avenue. San Francisco’s Allison Grace Williams was the lead architect, and she made the building into a kind of announcement for the Cultural District: here, it tells us, you are entering a place where great things are happening.
