A Walking Tour of Penn Avenue - One of America's Finest Streets

[hipster duck]

Wow! What a great tour! You've convinced me that Penn Ave. truly is one of America's great streets.

What Pittsburgh has generally gained in momentum, it has lost in inspiration. It's unfortunately caught in a paradigm of enough interest to develop, but bound by it's creativeness and capital to focus on legacy projects. Communist barracks not withstanding, just recently a few announcements, renderings and adaptive reuse plans (which given the city's punch-above-weight 20th century architecture, usually turn out well) may finally be tipping the scales towards tastefulness.

That's a very astute observation. Hang in there. When there's a critical mass of urban-minded people who value good design, a tipping point will be reached where architecturally inspiring projects become the default. For example, Toronto - the city I'm mostly familiar with - has had a 15 year sustained condo boom, but it was only in the past 6 or 7 years that condos became really striking. There was an incredible amount of garbage being produced as recently as 10 years ago. Then, all of a sudden, people began demanding good design in their urban environments and now the worst designs are on par with the very best designs of ten years ago. I've seen the shift happen much more recently in Calgary, too.

The problem is that the developers that were there first got the best sites, so the most prominent locations have some of the most uninspiring designs. There's not much you can do about that.

[giantSwan]

great pictures, great job...but one of american's finest streets? I think you need to get out more

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by giantSwan

great pictures, great job...but one of american's finest streets? I think you need to get out more

It's an excellent transect of urban America from streetcar suburbs to a thriving college district to a wholesale/garment district turned urban market to a skyscraper financial district.

How many single streets in America achieve all that?

[Wiz Khalifa]

Originally Posted by giantSwan

great pictures, great job...but one of american's finest streets? I think you need to get out more

Pretty lame response, it's not like he said this is a top 3 street in the entire country. He just said "one of the finest streets", which could mean one of the top 20.

If you take the best street from each of the top 25 metros in the country and compare them all, Penn Avenue would fit right in... or would you care to provide evidence that suggests otherwise?

[giantSwan]

Originally Posted by Wiz Khalifa

Pretty lame response, it's not like he said this is a top 3 street in the entire country. He just said "one of the finest streets", which could mean one of the top 20.

If you take the best street from each of the top 25 metros in the country and compare them all, Penn Avenue would fit right in... or would you care to provide evidence that suggests otherwise?

It's obviously subjective and I'm not here to start a city-city fight. I'm glad you love the street. But as someone who is probably older and has lived and traveled extensively- a bunch of McDonalds, Targets, etc doesn't really put Penn ave in the top 20 of anything.

Lakeshore drive, Magnificent Mile (CHI), Fifth Ave, Broadway (NYC), Sunset Blvd, Ocean Ave (LA), Commonwealth Ave, Beacon St (BOS), Collins Ave (MIA), Massachusetts Ave (DC), and on and on and on and on and on.

As per my definition of "finest street in the US", no, it wouldn't even register in the top 100. It's still a cool looking street with some interesting characteristics. But again, we can agree to disagree. That's why choice and diversity are beautiful things.

[Wiz Khalifa]

Originally Posted by giantSwan

It's obviously subjective and I'm not here to start a city-city fight. I'm glad you love the street. But as someone who is probably older and has lived and traveled extensively- a bunch of McDonalds, Targets, etc doesn't really put Penn ave in the top 20 of anything.

A difference in opinion is fine, but the bolded statement proves that you have no idea what you are talking about. A bunch of Mcdonalds and targets?? There are 3... spread out along a nine mile long street. Manhattan has hundreds of Mcdonalds and streets with 4x that number of Mcdonalds on them. Does that make all of those streets garbage to you?

For someone who claims to be so well traveled, you sure have a laughably ridiculous method for ranking streets.

[wanderer34]

Some nice pics of the Steel City. If only it grew. At least it could claim it's bigger than Cleveland!!!

[STLeric]

Awesome street, love Pittsburgh!

[Chef]

I didn't notice this great thread until now. I really like the way it is an urban cross section of a city.

[mSeattle]

Impressive!