Carved brackets and other ornaments on the entrance to one of the splendid Fourth Avenue bank towers.
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Carved Ornaments on the Benedum-Trees Building
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Allegheny General Hospital
An Art Deco interpretation of the skyscraper style old Pa Pitt calls “Mausoleum-on-a-Stick,” in which the cap of the skyscraper is patterned after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The architects, York & Sawyer, seem to have been taken with the style; they designed another Mausoleum-on-a-Stick building in the same year (1926) for Montreal. You can see a picture of it in one of old Pa Pitt’s earlier articles on Allegheny General Hospital.
The original skyscraper hospital was a marvel of practical hospital design. Everything radiates from a central core of elevators, and nothing is more than a few steps from the elevator. Later the hospital was expanded with new buildings in wildly mismatched styles, so that the complex has become the hopeless jungle of dead-end corridors and mismatched floors usual in big-city hospitals.
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Skyline Abstraction
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Cathedral of Learning from Across Schenley Plaza
One of the most remarkable things about the Cathedral of Learning is that it is an isolated skyscraper. There are very few places in the world where a skyscraper can be examined by itself, and few skyscrapers so much worth examining as this, which Father Pitt has often declared the only convincing application of Gothic style to the skyscraper form.
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Cathedral of Learning Through the Trees
The Cathedral of Learning seen through the trees in front of the Schenley Plaza side of the Carnegie Institute building.
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Cathedral of Learning
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United Steelworkers Building from the Boulevard of the Allies
Architects Curtis and Davis enlivened what would have been a simple square box with a distinctive diamond-grid facing that continues down into the pillars at ground level.
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Reflections in PPG Place
Artsy if not artistic pictures of PPG Place reflecting PPG Place and nearby buildings.
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Litchfield Towers, Oakland
Two of the three cylindrical skyscraper dormitories poetically named A, B, and C by the University of Pittsburgh, but popularly known as Ajax, Bab-O, and Comet.
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Cathedral of Learning in the Rain
It started to rain while Father Pitt was out for a walk today, which gave us this atmospheric picture of the Cathedral of Learning looming through the mist like a heavenly palace behind the pleasant houses of Schenley Farms. This is why old Pa Pitt’s cameras live in a waterproof bag. Father Pitt himself is not waterproof, but he does dry fairly quickly.
If you like black and white and all the greys in between, you might enjoy Father Pitt’s Monochrome World, a very simple site that collects his favorite black-and-white pictures from Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
