The Medical Arts Building in Oakland is about as far into Art Deco as a respectable medical establishment would dare go. The entrance is particularly bold, with its broad expanse of glass revealing gorgeous chandeliers within, and a stone inscription (a bit blackened from decades of industrial soot) that belongs in a Pandro S. Berman production.
Henry Clay Frick specified that the William Penn should be the best hotel in America, so the best hotel was what he got. The building itself is notable for its restrained elegance; inside, it was the first hotel in the United States with a private bath in every room. At first glance it seems almost severely plain, but step back a block or so and the harmony of the proportions becomes more obvious. The ornament, too, is neither lavish nor gaudy, but simply in the very best taste. Nearly a century after it was built, the William Penn remains Pittsburgh’s most famous and most elegant hotel.
Pittsburgh used to be a city of massive black stone buildings. In a few years, perhaps, they will all have disappeared–not torn down, but cleaned of the soot deposits from decades of heavy industry. When the mills died and the cleanings began, it came as a surprise to many Pittsburghers that the uniquely Pittsburghish black stones they had known all their lives were, underneath it all, quite pale and ordinary-looking, almost like the stones in every other city. Experts say that the pollutants eat away at the stones, so I suppose the cleanings are necessary; but I miss those black stones. Albright Community United Methodist Church on Centre Avenue in Shadyside has not been cleaned yet; this is its tower, still gloriously black, though not as inky black as it was at the peak of the steel industry.
First United Methodist Church sits where Shadyside, East Liberty, Friendship, and Bloomfield all meet. It would be hard for a building to get much more Richardsonian without having been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson himself.
Just a quick walk up one block of Liberty Avenue, from the Wood Street subway station to the EBA busway stop.
Downtown Pittsburgh is built on a tiny triangle of land at the junction of two rivers. In the latter 1700s, when the town was laid out, rational town planning was very fashionable, and the grid was the ideal. The only way to lay a grid in a triangle, however, was to make it two colliding grids at different angles, and Liberty Avenue is where the collision occurs. The southeastern side of Liberty Avenue is lined with buildings in all sorts of odd shapes, especially triangles.
Here are two classic Victorian commercial buildings, one updated with a bit of postmodernist frippery on top. Would you care to buy it? It certainly has a lot of natural light from those windows.
Roslyn Place is a tiny and impossibly narrow street lined with small but dignified brick townhouses. So far it is little different from any of a dozen other nearby townhouse plans of the early 1900s. But it is the street itself, rather than the houses that line it, that is the attraction.
Those are not bricks that pave the street; they’re wood blocks. Here’s a closer look:
A somewhat bedraggled plaque on the handsome wrought-iron fence along Ellsworth Avenue dates the pavement to the year 1914.
