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.
Addendum: The building was put up in 1909 for the Meyer Jonasson Company, a high-class clothing firm. The architects were MacClure & Spahr.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries occupy the old Monongahela National Bank building, one of the many peculiarly shaped buildings along Liberty Avenue where the two grids collide in the John Woods street plan from 1784. This one is a right triangle.
The picture is a composite, and if you click on it to enlarge it, you can have fun pointing out several ghosts among the people waiting for buses outside the station.
EQT Plaza reflected in the K & L Gates Center, and the Keenan Building and the Clark Building reflected in Two PNC Plaza.
Camera: Samsung Digimax V4.
If we put some imagination into this picture, we can see Liberty Avenue as it was in the middle 1800s, when it was the center of the wholesale food trade (which later moved out to the Strip). But the old storefronts from that era are dwarfed by the 12-storey Diamond Building at the end of the block, and that in turn is dwarfed by the later skyscrapers behind it.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A540.
