Shadows highlight the unusually intricate brickwork on the Schiller Glocke Gesang und Turn Verein, South Side.
The former State Office Building was designed by the firm of Altenhof and Bown (also responsible for the 1964 Federal Building on Grant Street; otherwise they seem to have specialized in schools). There was some grumbling when the state sold the building to private developers to be turned into luxury apartments, since space had to be found for the state employees, and some analyses suggested that the state would spend far more on leasing space than it would have spent on renovating the building. But it is certainly a first-rate location for apartments.
The Keenan Building in bright early-morning sunshine, seen from Sixth Avenue.
Three Gateway Center (1952, architects Eggers & Higgins), seen down the western end of Forbes Avenue from the Diamond. The distinctive stainless-steel facing of the first three Gateway Center towers was an afterthought, and a very lucky one. They were to be faced with brick, which would have made them humdrum undistinguished vertical warehouses like a thousand other modernist cruciform brick towers around the world. But bricks were in short supply after the Second World War, and for once budget constraints led to a much more pleasing result.
Alden and Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects, designed this branch library, as they did many others. This one opened in 1909.
The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente Bridge, looking toward the North Side, in glorious black and white.
Formerly Union Presbyterian Church, this congregation has been here more than two centuries. In the adjacent burying ground are several Revolutionary War veterans, and the hilltop church with the cemetery below is irresistibly picturesque.
Old Pa Pitt, however, could not get a good picture of the church today, because he was there in the afternoon when the sun was shining in the wrong direction. So instead he gives you the next best thing, which is an atmospheric picture. You can always compensate for a picture’s defects by turning it black and white and calling it art.
Father Pitt never needs an excuse to offer yet another picture of Old St. Luke’s, one of our most picturesque country churches. The current building dates from 1852, but the congregation goes back to colonial times, and was the epicenter of the Whiskey Rebellion.
Cemeteries in Pittsburgh are littered with obelisks. Let us agree that, in this post-Freudian era, we have no need of the facile explanation that occurs to the snickering schoolchild in each one of us, and admit that a lofty obelisk can be a grand symbol of heavenward aspiration.
