One of the first great silent movie palaces (the old Loew’s Penn) to be turned into a concert hall, Heinz Hall set a trend, both here and elsewhere. With the old Stanley and Fulton (now the Benedum and Byham), it is one of the three large anchors of the theater district downtown.
Now student housing under the name “Penn Commons.” It was originally built, in 1896, for Henry Phipps, Andrew Carnegie’s close friend and the donor of the Phipps Conservatories for both Pittsburgh and Allegheny (the latter of which, much expanded, is now the National Aviary).
This is a large composite picture; don’t open the full-size version on a metered connection.
Penn Avenue downtown in the theater district. Above, looking west from Seventh Street; Theater Square (designed by Michael Graves), with the Greer Cabaret Theater and the Public Theater, is on the right, and Heinz Hall is on the left at the end of the block. Two Gateway Center looms at the end of the street. Below, from Sixth Street, with the Phipps-McElveen Building and the old Horne’s department store on the right, and Two Gateway Center looming closer.
Penn Avenue in the Cultural District, Pittsburgh, from the corner of Sixth Street. The view includes the O’Reilly Theater and Theater Square (architect Michael Graves) and the Penn Avenue bikeway.
Both these buildings are quite utilitarian, with ground-floor storefronts and upper-floor workshops; but each is adorned with its own distinctive classical detailing. The Greek-key pattern shows up on both, but no. 819 in particular adds a profusion of other ornaments that distinguish it from its neighbors.
Once again, the narrowness of Penn Avenue makes it difficult to get a complete picture of the façades of these buildings, so the tops are a little blurry.
These two buildings, like many in the Cultural District, are going residential. Though the styles are radically different—the McNally Building light and classical, the Bonn Building heavy and Romanesque—they are only three years apart: the McNally building was put up in 1896, the Bonn Building in 1893.
Penn Avenue is a very narrow street, and getting a picture of the whole front of a nine-story building involves a lot of fiddling, most of it done by the Hugin stitching program automatically. Thus the picture is a bit fuzzy toward the top.
