The William Penn Hotel

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.

Richardsonian Romanesque

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.

A Short Stroll Up Liberty Avenue

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.

A Stroll through Allegheny Cemetery

A short stroll in the snow through an enchanted landscape filled with fantastic temples, angels, and cold beauties with warm hearts.

Museum as Art

The Frick Art Museum in Point Breeze was built as a home for Helen Clay Frick’s art collection. It’s a small collection, but chosen with good taste–a Boucher here, a Reynolds there, and a roomful of priceless medieval religious art. The building itself is less than forty years old, but the timeless design could easily have been a Renaissance palace.

Imposingly Ionic

The columns of the Mellon Institute building in Oakland are supposedly the largest monolithic columns in the world. Anyone who spends time in Pittsburgh will notice a kind of local obsession with having the largest this or that in the world.

A Kaleidoscope of Glass and Iron

Looking up from under the rotunda of Penn Station, which is now converted to apartments and offices. If you want to catch a train, you have to go out back by the trash cans, where a small modern station has been grafted onto the main building.

Presbyterian Gothic

First Presbyterian Church sits on Sixth Avenue next to Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) and just across the street from the Duquesne Club. These are the bastions of old money in Pittsburgh, and plenty of that money went into the elaborate Gothic ornamentation of the church building, not to mention its famous stained glass by Tiffany.

Romanesque in Phipps

A Romanesque capital in Phipps Conservatory, at the back of the palm house.

Manchester Romanesque

H. H. Richardson’s courthouse started a fad for “Richardsonian Romanesque” architecture in Pittsburgh, in private homes as well as in public buildings. Here’s a well-preserved corner house in Manchester.