Having walled off the Carnegie Building on the east side, Henry Frick commissioned Daniel Burnham once more to build a wall on the south side. Once again, Burnham responded with an elegant design: not quite the masterpiece that the Frick Building was, but beautiful and perfectly proportioned, as you’d expect from Burnham. Here we see it from the porch of the City-County Building, with the statue of Richard Caliguiri in the foreground.
The Allegheny County Courthouse was finished in 1886, its tower the tallest thing in the city. In 1902, the Frick Building went up across the street, facing down the courthouse and blocking the view of the tower from much of the Golden Triangle.
Mr. Franklin Toker (Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, p. 70) tells us that the Frick Building was part of what may be the most extravagant display of architectural pettiness ever contemplated. Henry Frick had fallen out with his old patron Andrew Carnegie, and he considered the breach irreparable. The Carnegie Building was one of the finest office buildings in the city; Frick surrounded it with taller buildings that blocked out its views, light, and air, symbolically suffocating Mr. Carnegie (who had removed to Scotland and was therefore out of reach of literal suffocation). The Carnegie Building is gone, replaced with a singularly windowless annex to Kaufmann’s (now Macy’s); Frick’s monumental wall around it remains.
That story aside, the Frick Building is an exceptionally fine piece of architecture. Daniel Burnham designed it, and its classical elegance must have pleased Frick immensely. It has the misfortune, however, of being right across the street from “the best building in America,” as Philip Johnson famously called Richardson’s courthouse. Not even Daniel Burnham could compete with Richardson’s masterpiece, and wisely he decided not to. Burnham’s Pennsylvania Station is an extravagant spectacle; this is simply a remarkably tasteful office building, in its way nearly perfect.
The fantastical Arabian Nights dome on top of this building was Col. Keenan’s own penthouse. It was rumored to be a love nest he shared with his mistress; Mr. Franklin Toker relates that a whole generation of Pittsburgh ladies learned to cross the street rather than walk on the sidewalk in front of that den of iniquity. In front of it is the low triangular building that began as the Monongahela National Bank, but now houses the Wood Street subway station below and an art gallery above.
The City-County Building, which houses a miscellaneous collection of offices for the governments of both Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, is one of Henry Hornbostel’s greatest works. It’s a perfect use of architecture to express an idea. Your local government is a great and magnificent, indeed almost imperial, institution; but at the same time it is perfectly accessible to you, the common citizen, through the gargantuan arches that face the street. All this grandeur exists to serve you.
This wonderfully ornate protrusion on the roof of the Union Trust Building, the masterpiece of Frederick Osterling, has given rise to the urban legend that there is a secret chapel on the roof, where perhaps Henry Clay Frick himself went to repent of his many sins. The truth is more prosaic and yet more impressive as an architectural accomplishment: the chapel-like structure houses the mechanics for the elevators and other necessities that normally make ugly blisters on the roofs of large buildings.
The Union Trust Building is just across the street from the Grant Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station.
A winter morning’s sunlight, reflected from the windows of the Frick Building, paints the tower of the Allegheny County Courthouse with stripes of gold. Henry Hobson Richardson, one of America’s greatest architects, considered this his masterpiece, though he did not live to see it completed. Philip Johnson, whose PPG Place has become the iconic symbol of the Pittsburgh skyline, called the Courthouse the best building in America.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then this is an unusually well-flattered building: the city hall of Minneapolis is an acknowledged copy of it. It is not unusual for an architect to copy a famous classical or medieval building, but quite rare to copy one that was only a quarter-century old at the time. Such was Richardson’s reputation that Long and Kees, architects of the Minneapolis City Hall, were willing to pay this ultimate tribute to their master in what is widely considered their own masterpiecce.
The Courthouse is half a block south on Grant Street from the Grant Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station.
Update: The Highland Building has been expensively restored and looks beautiful.
Daniel Burnham designed many of the most distinguished buildings downtown. East Liberty, which once called itself the “second downtown,” is the only other neighborhood in the city with a Burnham building. It’s far from his biggest work in Pittsburgh, but the Highland Building is an elegant design that has been left shamefully derelict. Now that East Liberty is rapidly reviving, there are plans for a luxury hotel here, which would be a fine second use for a building that desperately needs to be loved.
Like everything else in the central business district of East Liberty, the Highland Building is a short walk from the East Liberty Station on the East Busway.
Franklin Toker, the architectural historian, says this may be, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America. Ralph Adams Cram (who may have been America’s greatest Gothic architect) designed it, and it was built with enormous donations of Mellon money, which is why locals know it as the Mellon Fire Escape. It dominates East Liberty from every angle. Above, a view from the south over the rooftops of East Liberty; below, the great central tower.
The Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad (which never made it to Lake Erie, by the way) was a little fellow compared to the gargantuan Pennsylvania Railroad. But it made good money, and when it built this station in 1899, it showed that it could play with the big boys. The station cost three quarters of a million dollars, which was a tremendous amount in those days. (It still sounds like a good deal of money to old Pa Pitt.) The interior is madly luxurious, and nowhere more so than in the stained glass. Besides the glorious semicircular window at the western end, the entire ceiling of the grand concourse is stained glass.
Passenger trains no longer stop here (they stop downtown behind the old Pennsylvania Station), but the building has been gloriously restored and turned into the “Grand Concourse,” which must surely be the most architecturally impressive restaurant in the city.
Firstside, the block-long row of human-sized buildings along the Mon Wharf, is a small taste of the Pittsburgh of the nineteenth century, before behemoths with steel skeletons rose to dizzying heights. But even here we see the seeds that would sprout into skyscrapers. The brown cube-shaped building with the fire escapes at the right end of the row is the Conestoga Building, the first building in Pittsburgh built on a steel cage, and one of the first few in the world. This kind of construction indefinitely extended the height a building could support, while simultaneously the elevator removed the human limit of about six flights of stairs.
