Preservation Opportunities & Awards
PHLF: Virtual Tour of Penn-Liberty Cultural District
Thursday, February 23
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
$10
This tour will be conducted via Zoom Conference.
Click here to purchase a ticket. (Because this is a virtual event, please disregard the QR code information in the ticket e-mailed to you.)
You will receive an e-mail with a link to the Zoom event on February 23. (Tickets will not be available after 9:00 am on the day of the event.) Please log in at 5:45 pm so that we can start the tour on time.
The Penn-Liberty corridor in Downtown Pittsburgh was an important retail and commercial center in the 19th and early 20th centuries, featuring excellent examples of early skyscrapers standing cheek-by-jowl with more modest structures. Today, after a decades-long period of decline in the mid-20th century, it is the site of a thriving arts scene, much of it housed in stunning historic buildings that have been restored and creatively repurposed.
In addition to seeing many such examples of historic preservation in action, tour participants will learn of the crucial roles of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and PHLF in creating what has been called the country’s “most impressive and successful” example of urban economic revitalization through the arts.
Please Join Us Tomorrow for a Celebratory Check Presentation for the Renovation of the Allegheny YMCA
Please join us for a celebratory check presentation
Tuesday, February 7 at 10:30 am
Allegheny YMCA Gymnasium | 600 W. North Avenue
Small group tours will be available following a brief program.
The Allegheny YMCA Gymnasium will be closed for the duration of the event.
A CATALYTIC PROJECT
This project entails the renovation and update of all common spaces, the kitchen, fitness facilities including the wellness floor, pool area and locker rooms, and meeting rooms. 96 single room occupancy (SRO) units will be renovated on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floors with a new configuration that replaces shared bathrooms with private facilities and provides a much-needed community room for the residents. Rooms and corridor renovations will include flooring, painting and ceilings. Additional work will include replacement of mechanical, plumbing and electrical systems and installation of a sprinkler system. Air-conditioning and new elevators will be added. The renovations will use high quality, environmentally friendly materials. The SRO units will be designed with thoughtful floor plans and natural light. This renovation ensures that the entire building is fully ADA assessable.
Other important amenities for the residents of the Allegheny Y include access to the wellness facility and swimming pool, daily NA and AA group meetings within walking distance, access to local feeding programs and a small community garden providing fresh produce.
PHLF: Walking Tour of Deutschtown
Saturday, October 29
10:00 am to 12:00 pm
$20.00 per person
This is an in-person tour and is limited to 20 participants. (Tickets will not be available after October 28.)
Click here to purchase a ticket.
Pittsburgh’s East Allegheny neighborhood was nicknamed Deutschtown because most of the area’s early settlers were from Germany. (“Deutschtown” literally means “Germantown.”) Joining them were large numbers from Switzerland, Austria, and Croatia. By the late 19th century, it was a thriving community with established businesses and institutions. Although a 1970s interstate highway project bisected the Deutschtown area, causing the demolition of buildings and displacement of hundreds of people, the community retains a large part of its historic architectural fabric.
Join our docents as they reveal the rich history of this eclectic neighborhood. The tour will take participants through the Deutschtown Historic District and the E. Ohio Street business district, which lie in the western half of the neighborhood. It includes a wide range of building types, from well-preserved historic homes to old structures repurposed for contemporary uses—and an Elks Lodge that hosts the Pittsburgh Banjo Club every week.
PHLF: Walking Tour of the Strip District
Tuesday, October 25
10:00 am to 12:00 pm
$20.00 per person
This is an in-person tour and is limited to 20 participants. (Tickets will not be available after October 24.)
Click here to purchase a ticket.
The Strip District is a vibrant amalgamation of Pittsburgh’s past, present, and imagined future. It is probably best known locally for food sellers and other businesses that reflect the neighborhood’s long immigrant history. In its 200-plus-year history, however, the Strip has been a site of industry, the region’s wholesale produce distribution hub, a center for nighttime dining and entertainment, and, most recently, home to Pittsburgh’s burgeoning technology sector.
The Strip’s ongoing evolution is mirrored in its architecture. Across a sprawling neighborhood, you will see everything from a small, two-story building constructed as a public bathhouse in 1911 to recent office buildings for the technology companies that have given the Strip a new nickname, “Robotics Row.” Preservation and repurposing of historic buildings have been key to the revitalization of the Strip in the last 20 years, and the tour will center on the historic buildings through which the Strip’s fascinating history is told.
PHLF: Downtown Walking Tour of Fourth Avenue Historic District
Thursday, October 11
6:00 pm to 7:15 pm
$20.00 per person
This is an in-person tour and is limited to 20 participants.
(Tickets will not be available after October 10.)
Click here to purchase a ticket.
The Fourth Avenue Historic District encompasses a remarkable variety of buildings. From a Greek Revival building of 1836 to cast-iron-front structures of the 1870s and 1880s, to a majestic quartet of early-20th-century skyscrapers, the district includes distinguished structures designed by more than a dozen eminent Pittsburgh architects.
The tour focuses on the portion of the area once known as “Pittsburgh’s Wall Street” for its concentration of buildings that served the financial and investment industries. We also will see how old buildings are being re-purposed for contemporary uses and explore PPG Place—the postmodernist “cathedral of commerce” that brings full circle the fascinating story of this narrow but mightily impressive street.
PHLF: The Historic Smithfield Street Bridge
We look at the Smithfield Street Bridge in our ongoing series, “Past is Present,” profiling the aesthetic beauty of Pittsburgh’s historic built environment. Through this series of vignettes featuring stories and a look at the history of buildings, bridges, and landmarks, we hope to give some insight into our city’s built environment and its rich architectural history.
This series was funded by a grant of the Colcom Foundation.
PHLF: Downtown Walking Tour of Bridges and Shores
Thursday, August 11
6:00 pm to 7:15 pm
$20.00 per person
This is an in-person tour and is limited to 20 participants.
(Tickets will not be available after .)
Click here to purchase a ticket.
You will receive a ticket with a QR Code by e-mail. Please PRINT and bring it with you for the tour.
Pittsburgh is a city of bridges: hundreds of them span our waterways, valleys, and ravines. Bridges offer changing vistas of the natural and manmade features of the cityscape, and in Pittsburgh, these works of artful engineering are a source of civic pride. This tour takes us on a loop bounded by the north and south shores of the Allegheny River and by two of the Three Sisters bridges that cross it. Taking in public art and historic buildings along with bridges and the river, this tour reveals the dynamic relationship between humans and nature that characterizes much of Pittsburgh.
Tour Meeting Point: Outside the Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel, 107 Sixth Street, Downtown
Tour Ending Point: 107 Sixth Street
Please arrive 10 minutes before the start time in order to ensure that the tour gets underway on time. Dress for the weather (PHLF tours proceed rain or shine!), and wear comfortable shoes. By purchasing a ticket for this tour, you acknowledge that you are physically able to undertake the tour, assume all personal risk during the tour, consent to being photographed during the tour, and permit PHLF to use your image in our communications.
This tour is handicap accessible. Please notify us of your needs 2 Business Days in advance of the tour.
PHLF: Virtual Neighborhood Tour of Western Shadyside
Thursday, July 28
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
Fee: $7.50
This tour will be conducted via Zoom Conference. Click here to purchase a ticket. You will receive an e-mail with a link to the Zoom event on July 28. (Tickets will not be available after 9:00 am on the day of the event.)
Please log in at 5:45 pm to allow us enough time to let you into the tour.
Shadyside is a veritable museum of the forms and styles of domestic architecture built in Pittsburgh’s East End between the 1860s and 1920s. This tour focuses on the neighborhood’s western part, bounded by North Neville Street and South Aiken Avenue. Learn how innovations in transportation, the growth of the middle class, and the initiative of significant people in local history combined to produce Western Shadyside’s stellar architecture.
Ranging across styles from the Second Empire to Arts & Crafts, the tour explores single-family and multi-family dwellings, individual homes and planned developments, and main streets and cul-de-sacs. A deeper look at a home featured in an early-twentieth-century memoir rounds out our excursion into this lovely neighborhood.
Because this is a virtual event, please disregard the QR code information in the ticket emailed to you.
PHLF: Walking Grant Street from Sixth to Liberty Avenues
Wednesday, July 13
6:00 pm – 7:15 pm
$20.00 per person
This tour is limited to 20 participants.
(Tickets will not be available after July 12)
Click here to purchase a ticket.
You will receive a ticket with a QR Code by e-mail. Please PRINT and bring it with you for the tour
This tour covers the northern half of a street the American Planning Association designated one of America’s Ten Great Streets in 2012. From the quintessentially Modernist U.S. Steel Tower to the elegant Beaux-Arts Pennsylvanian (formerly Union Station), and with glorious Art Deco gems in between, this part of Grant Street is populated by outstanding civic and corporate buildings.
Examples of adaptive re-use of historic buildings in this corridor demonstrate the economic value of historic preservation. Tour participants also will learn of the wide influence—sometimes explicit, other times less so—of businessman, philanthropist, politician, art collector, and Pittsburgh native Andrew W. Mellon on this important street.
PHLF: Sewickley Walking Tour
Saturday, July 9
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
$20.00 per person
This is an in-person tour and is limited to 20 participants.
(Tickets will not be available after July 8.)
Click here to purchase a ticket.
You will receive a ticket with a QR Code by e-mail. Please PRINT and bring it with you for the tour.
Located 12 miles west of Pittsburgh, Sewickley is nestled between hills to the north and the Ohio River to the South. Taking its name from the Native American word for “Sweet Water,” Sewickley was incorporated as a borough in 1853 and dubbed “the Queen of Suburbs” by one writer in 1895.
The tour focuses on the commercial and residential neighborhoods of the Borough’s Third Historic District, in central Sewickley. Here you will see excellent examples of many of the architectural styles popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including work by a number of regionally and nationally important architects who lived and worked in the area.
Featuring places of worship, civic buildings, and handsome homes, the tour will demonstrate why this historic community continues to delight.