Father Pitt

Tag: Liberty Avenue

  • Cast-Iron Front, Liberty Avenue

    A fine example of a Victorian cast-iron façade, nicely restored, on Liberty Avenue in the Cultural District.

  • Ewart Building

    The prolific Charles Bickel designed this well-balanced Romanesque building, two doors up from another one of his Romanesque creations on Liberty Avenue, the Maginn Building. Below we see both of them in context, with, of course, a bus coming toward us, because old Pa Pitt likes to do that.

  • 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.

  • 606 Liberty Avenue

    This beautiful (and odd-shaped) building at what used to be the intersection of Liberty and Oliver is now “coworking” offices, which is the trendy term for “offices with free beer.”

    The last block of Oliver Avenue was absorbed into PNC Plaza, but this building remains to outline the old odd-angled intersection.

  • Liberty Theater (Baum Building)

    Like many buildings on the southeast side of Liberty Avenue, where the two grids of our eighteenth-century street plan collide, the Baum Building is forced into a triangle. It began its life as the Liberty Theater, but it lasted for only a few years before being turned into offices. Now, under the ownership of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, it has gone back into the entertainment business as an art gallery.

    Addendum: The architect was Edward B. Lee. The theater was built in 1912; the conversion to offices was done in 1920, and Father Pitt suspects Lee supervised that as well. See this page in The Brickbuilder from 1913 for a picture of the building as originally built.

  • Clark Building

    The Clark Building, designed by the Hoffman-Henon Co of Philadelphia, was built in 1927 at the same time as the Stanley Theater by the same architects. This late-Beaux-Arts skyscraper has for a long time been the center of the jewelry district downtown, with at least a dozen jewelers in the building (“over thirteen,” a sign on the building says, meaning, what, fourteen?) and more within a block or so.

  • Terra Cotta on Liberty Avenue

    This splendid building, faced with ornate reliefs in terra cotta, is one of those odd-shaped buildings created by the colliding grids of the 1785 street plan for the Triangle. The iron-and-glass awning is particularly artistic, bringing a touch of Art Nouveau to the streetscape.

  • Decoration on the Liberty Theater

    The classical building at Liberty Avenue and Strawberry Way was built originally as the Liberty Theater in 1913. It lasted only ten years as a theater before being converted to office space as the Baum Building.

  • Triangle Building

    The aptly named Triangle Building fills the small triangle of space left over from the awkward intersection of Liberty Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Smithfield Street. It was originally known, it seems, as the McCance Block.

  • Liberty Avenue from Seventh Avenue

    This is quite a stunning view for out-of-towners; Pittsburghers probably don’t realize how unusual it is to be confronted with such a well-preserved late-Victorian commercial streetscape, because we have quite a few of those.