This small piece of the old façade sticks up over the undistinguished tiles that cover the rest of this Fifth Avenue building. It must have been quite a façade when we could see the rest of it.
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Grotesque Face on Fifth Avenue
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Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building
We’ve seen this building elsewhere, from an angle, but here is old Pa Pitt’s best attempt (so far) at seeing it head-on from the front, the way the architects (Dowler & Dowler) might have drawn it back in 1956. The picture is a composite, and there are stitching errors if you examine it closely; but it still gives a better impression of the design of the building than any other picture of it that Father Pitt has seen.
One of the building’s most attractive features is the Pennsylvania relief with rotating globe, illustrating the slogan “Anywhere Any Time by Telephone.” The relief shows outsized Pittsburgh as “Gateway to the West,” and the clearly less important Philadelphia as home of the Liberty Bell and City Hall. The globe used to rotate to show the part of the earth currently illuminated by sunlight; but both the globe and the clock above it have stopped, and the plastic window over the globe is sadly fogged. Now that the building has become luxury apartments, perhaps an enlightened ownership will put a little money into restoring what used to be one of downtown’s unique attractions.
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Decorations on the Buhl Building
The Buhl Building on Fifth Avenue, one of Benno Janssen’s earlier works, is covered with terra-cotta reliefs in Wedgwood colors.
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Decoration on the Liberty Theater
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.
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The Maul Building
The Maul Building at Carson and Seventeenth is noted for its ornate terra-cotta exterior. Unfortunately the cornice has been lost, but the rest of the building, which dates from 1910, is still one of Carson Street’s commercial treasures.
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Tympanum on the People’s Savings Bank
John Massey Rhind, the famous sculptor who did the four representatives of the Noble Quartet outside the Carnegie and the Robert Burns statue outside Phipps Conservatory, contributed decorative reliefs to the 1901 People’s Savings Bank tower on Fourth Avenue. This one is over the Wood Street entrance.
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Lions on the Arrott Building
The Arrott Building is the most lavishly ornamented of the Fourth Avenue bank towers. The ornaments near the top may be best appreciated from another one of the Fourth Avenue bank towers—or with a very long lens from the street.
