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.
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Penn Avenue, Cultural District
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819 and 821 Penn Avenue
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.
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McNally and Bonn Buildings, Penn Avenue
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.
