The Keenan Building in bright early-morning sunshine, seen from Sixth Avenue.
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Keenan Building
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Three Gateway Center
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.
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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.
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Sixth Avenue
A view of Sixth Avenue from the porch of the First Presbyterian Church, looking toward the Keenan Building with its fantastical dome. On the right in front of the Keenan Building are the Wood Street Galeries and Wood Street subway station.
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Reflections Along Liberty Avenue
EQT Plaza reflected in the K & L Gates Center, and the Keenan Building and the Clark Building reflected in Two PNC Plaza.
Camera: Samsung Digimax V4.
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Two PNC Plaza and Three PNC Plaza
Two PNC Plaza (with the PNC logo at the top) and Three PNC Plaza (center, with the notch cut out of it), as seen from Liberty Avenue.
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EQT Plaza (originally the CNG Tower)
One of old Pa Pitt’s favorites of the 1980s Postmodernist additions to downtown. It presents a different aspect from every angle, but everything is harmonized perfectly. It can be read as a 1980s update of the Beaux-Arts towers of eighty years before.
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Third Avenue
Looking up Third Avenue from the Stanwix Street end. In the distance we can see the towering striped octagons of One Oxford Centre.
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Fifth Avenue Place
This 1980s Postmodernist tower makes a dramatic impression from the middle of Stanwix Street.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.
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Diamond Building
The Diamond Building is by MacClure and Spahr, who skillfully met the challenge of a dauntingly irregular site by filling it with a building that looks as if it’s meant to be this shape. It was originally the headquarters of the Diamond Bank, whose logo can still be seen in metal grates at ground level.
Many of the interior details are preserved inside the Diamond Building. Here we look down the stairwell with its ornate railings.
