Posts Tagged ‘Drury Hotel’
Art Deco, always catches my eye
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Pittsburgh’s Grant Street hosts a catalogue of truly monumental and architecturally important buildings. City Hall and the Allegheny Courthouse are just down the block, as is the US Steel Building and several other skyscrapers.
Also important to my tale is that there’s a station for the T light rail just a few blocks away from Grant’s intersection with Liberty Avenue, which is more or less where these shots were gathered.
On Grant Street, there’s a ‘Federal’ Building, a big 1930’s style Post Office, and a giant hotel or two. Lots of the ‘big,’ and ‘important,’ and ‘power elite’ in the business and governmental world types of people spend their days along this stretch who make random decisions that the rest of us have to figure out how to live with.
The ‘Big Shots’ work on Grant Street, basically.
Click here for a Google Maps waypoint, centered on Grant Street, and have a look around using the street view feature. That’s how I remotely scout out an area which is unfamiliar. An interesting urban corridor.
As mentioned in previous posts, it was a fairly hot summer day when these shots were gathered, and one was forced to abandon the idea of walking in direct sunlight for hours and hours. After shaving a couple of miles off my walk by riding a bus on one of the busways, your humble narrator was soon roughly shambling towards a T light rail station to do the same on the way to the next destination.
Along the way, the ‘Drury Plaza Hotel Pittsburgh Downtown’ pictured above and below caught my eye, or at least parts of it did.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Federal Eagles? New Deal style construction…. Hmm… as it turned out, this is the former Federal Reserve Bank of Pittsburgh’s building.
Luckily, regarding the suffering of Our Lady of the Pentacle, I didn’t need to become obsessed with researching this one as the Drury people offer a fantastic and detailed account of this building, and its purpose prior to their renovation of the place which turned it into a hotelier space.
Neat!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Three of these capitols really caught my eye.
These are all mythological/allegorical characters, and I wonder if that one might be Pluto, the Roman God of the Underworld who was known for his fortune. The term ‘Plutocracy’ means Government of and for the wealthy, after all. As far as the other capitols, since I only had room for one in today’s missive; here is one which I think is meant to represent either Artemis or Ceres, and another which looks like it represents Mercury- here.
Again… neat.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Handsome structure, but I had spent too much time nearby a medium high security Federal Building while waving a camera around, and so rejoined my efforts to get to the train. Scuttle, scuttle, scuttle.
The amended plan would involve debarking the light rail at the Station Square stop, whereupon I’d again be walking directly beneath the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself for a spell.
There’d be about 15 minutes of air conditioning though, once I got into the station, so…
Up and over!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scuttle, scuttle, scuttle – that’s me.
Always going somewhere, with no actual place to go.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Liminal Spaces like this just keep on popping up for me lately.
Wait till you see what’s coming your way in just a few posts… whew!
There’s spaces like this all over Pittsburgh, which feel like walking through and into the Backrooms.
Empty, but with exquisitely maintained space. Floors are clean and clear of litter, glass is polished, all the lights work, air conditioning on. Not dusty, floors mopped. No visible commercial or human activity whatsoever, though.
Back tomorrow, with a big bunch of hey now!
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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
