The Diamond or Market Square is our most fussed-with public space. Here we see it being completely reconfigured fifteen years ago, and that reconfiguration is now being completely reconfigured. This view of Pittsburgh has changed more than most in the past decade and a half; two landmark skyscrapers, the Tower at PNC Plaza and Tower Two-Sixty, have risen on spots once occupied by low buildings in the background.
This building was probably put up shortly after the Great Fire of 1845, to judge from the fact that it appears in an engraving of the Diamond as it was before 1852. Few buildings from before the Civil War are left downtown, and this is almost certainly the largest.
The building in the engraving is not quite the right dimensions, but the engraver (at the firm of John C. Bragdon, Pittsburgh’s busiest engravers) was probably working from hasty sketches.
Note the volutes and incised decorations in the lintels over the windows, bringing the building up to date with the latest trends in Greek Revival style.
The west side of the Diamond or Market Square, seen from Graeme Street.
This building on the Diamond has lost its cornice, but the rest of it is intact, and the details are worth a closer look.
Pittsburgh dates from 1758, but downtown has prospered and burned and been rebuilt and prospered and decayed and prospered again so much that little remains from before the Civil War. This is one of the few survivors from the antebellum era: it was built before 1852, to judge from old engravings.
It called itself “the world’s largest variety store,” and it was probably right about that. G. C. Murphy was a big chain of five-and-dime stores based in McKeesport, but the downtown Pittsburgh store was its biggest and most exciting. It had three floors of everything, including concessions rented out to everything from produce vendors to fortune tellers. The whole establishment occupied the corner of Forbes Avenue and the Diamond and went through the block to Fifth Avenue.
The chain succumbed to corporate raiders in the 1980s, who exploited quirks of capitalist logic by driving the chain into bankruptcy and getting rich in the process. The downtown store contracted into a small part of its former empire, and then closed altogether.
For a while the buildings sat empty. Now they have been restored to beautiful condition, and the Diamond is thriving again. Old Pa Pitt wishes he could have Murphy’s back, but time like an ever-rolling stream and all that.
The blockish Tower Two-Sixty looms over the little human-sized buildings on the Diamond.
Fifth Avenue Place looms over the low human-sized buildings on the Diamond.
A wintry view across the Diamond or Market Square, with the Pittsburgh National Bank Building (One PNC Plaza), the U. S. Steel Tower, the Tower at PNC Plaza, and Tower Two-Sixty looming behind the square.
The west side of the Diamond or Market Square, looking down Graeme Street toward Fifth Avenue.
