Father Pitt

Tag: Liberty Avenue

  • Bloomfield in 1999

    Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield

    Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield, as it appeared in 1999. The picture was taken with an old folding Kodak Tourist camera.

  • Victory Building (in Better Light)

    Old Pa Pitt published a nearly identical picture of the Victory Building a while ago, but he was unhappy with the patch of blinding sunlight that washed out one corner of it. Here is the same view in more even lighting.

  • 945 Liberty Avenue

    From the days when this part of Liberty Avenue was mostly warehouses and light industry, this building, nicely restored, shows how much effort once went into ornamenting at least the front even of a utilitarian commercial structure.

  • 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.