Then & Now
Views change at Market Square, Block House, Luna Park, Forbes Field
Below: Market Square as it appears today. (Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette) To see this feature as an interactive, go to http://bit.ly/historicalpanoramics.
Market Square, the Fort Pitt Block House, Forbes Field and Luna Park are some of Pittsburgh’s most famous places. Yet only the first two remain, and they and their surroundings have changed a lot over the past 50 or 100 years.
For Then & Now, Post-Gazette artists and photographers spent months digging for historic images of these Pittsburgh landmarks. We found great panoramic views of Forbes Field and Luna Park, but not of Market Square and the Block House at the Point.
We wanted to create those wide views, so with the help of the University of Pittsburgh’s Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, period street maps from www.arcgis.com and historic Pittsburgh maps available online, we painstakingly stitched together photos, historic references and artist Dan Marsula’s drawings to flesh out the pictures in a creative but historically accurate way. Here’s how we did it:
Market Square
Known in the 1940s as Diamond Square, Market Square changed dramatically with the construction of PPG Plaza in the early 1980s. In 1946, several buildings stood in the now open area in Downtown Pittsburgh.
To reconstruct how Market Square looked in the 1940s, we went to images of Diamond Street, whose name was changed in 1958 to Forbes Avenue. Some of the buildings still exist, but in some cases we only had a small architectural detail to guide Mr. Marsula in the identificaton and re-creation of the buildings.
Fort Pitt Block House
Built in 1764, the Fort Pitt Block House is the oldest standing structure in Pittsburgh. Once part of a British frontier fort, the square, brick-and-timber building now stands in Point State Park near the Point in Downtown. We wanted to show what the Block House looked like in 1942, before the area was cleared and the park was built.
It wasn’t easy to track down photos of the buildings that once surrounded the historic structure. One of the nearby streets — which no longer exists — was called Water Street. It ran along the Monongahela River and many of its buildings faced the Mon.
Working with a narrow original image, Mr. Marsula used maps and archived photographs from other angles to reconstruct what the Point would have looked like in 1942. We found images of buildings that Mr. Marsula could re-create; he added in a vehicle from the time of the photo.
Next, photographers took pictures from the same vantage point as each of the historic images — or from as close as it was possible to get to the place where the photographer took the historic shot. We used the Block House as the anchor and then plotted in the distant Gulf Building and Rosenbaum’s Department Store to figure out the exact location.
Luna Park
Located at the intersection of Baum Boulevard and North Craig Street in North Oakland, Luna Park opened in 1905 as part of a chain of amusement parks under the same name. Pittsburgh’s Luna Park closed just four years later in 1909.
We started with a photo of Luna Park taken around 1905, the year it opened. The landscape surrounding the fantastical amusement park doesn’t look the least bit familiar — until you see the towers of St. Paul Cathedral sticking up in the background.
Forbes Field
South Bouquet Street in Oakland has changed dramatically since 1909, the year Barney Dreyfuss and his Pittsburgh Baseball Club opened Forbes Field. That year, the Pirates started the season at Exposition Park on the North Side and had moved to their new ballpark in Oakland by the end of June.
Those 1909 Pirates would finish the season as the National League pennant winner and went on to defeat the Detroit Tigers to capture the club’s first World Series victory.
Forbes Field hosted other Pittsburgh sports teams over the years, including the University of Pittsburgh’s football team. One historic photograph shows the Panthers earning a 19-0 victory over Washington & Jefferson on Nov. 6, 1915. After the demolition of Forbes Field in 1971, Pitt constructed Posvar Hall, which stands on the site today adjacent to Schenley Plaza.
Although most Pittsburghers are aware of the footprint of what was Forbes Field, seeing the present-day view taken from the same vantage point as the centuryold images is a surprise: a good portion of the view is the side of Posvar Hall.
We think you’ll find these past and present images as fascinating as we do. We invite you to send any documents or images you have that would give us more information on these landmarks.
To see more Then & Now photos, go to http://bit.ly/historicalpanoramics.