I never knew what this satellite dish at the corner of Penn Ave and Mathilda St was. The aggressively unlabeled building it was next to suggested something more prosaic than the TV or radio station that I liked to imagine was broadcasting, for some reason, from a ground-level parking lot.

Even in the generally dense east end, Pittsburgh has a real mixture of roughly 60+ year-old pedestrian-focused street-fronting density, and somewhat newer attempts to get with the later 20th century times by creating a more car-friendly landscape. Even now, when most of the architects, neighborhood groups, and city planners would rather skip devoting any more surface area to asphalt, we sometimes get stuck with the decidedly suburban-looking First National Bank branch newly built at the corner of Penn and Negley Avenues. So it was nice that this fairly ugly building with small windows and a large surface parking lot could at least offer a little visual interest in the form of a surprisingly large satellite dish. I’ll miss walking by it.