This ostentatious little building on Fifth Avenue is in need of some restoration. Something could be done with the ground floor to make it more in sympathy with the upper storeys without spending the immense fortune it would probably take to recreate the original classical front. Even a simple modernist glass front would be more harmonious.
We’ve seen this building elsewhere, from an angle, but here is old Pa Pitt’s best attempt (so far) at seeing it head-on from the front, the way the architects (Dowler & Dowler) might have drawn it back in 1956. The picture is a composite, and there are stitching errors if you examine it closely; but it still gives a better impression of the design of the building than any other picture of it that Father Pitt has seen.
One of the building’s most attractive features is the Pennsylvania relief with rotating globe, illustrating the slogan “Anywhere Any Time by Telephone.” The relief shows outsized Pittsburgh as “Gateway to the West,” and the clearly less important Philadelphia as home of the Liberty Bell and City Hall. The globe used to rotate to show the part of the earth currently illuminated by sunlight; but both the globe and the clock above it have stopped, and the plastic window over the globe is sadly fogged. Now that the building has become luxury apartments, perhaps an enlightened ownership will put a little money into restoring what used to be one of downtown’s unique attractions.
This is one of several works by Harrison and Abramovitz on Pittsburgh’s skyline—the most prominent, of course, being the U. S. Steel Tower, which dwarfs everything else. This one was built in 1953, making it probably the first of their works here. It was also the first aluminum-faced skyscraper (appropriate for the biggest aluminum producer in the world). To Father Pitt, it always looks like a stack of 1950s television sets.
This concrete spiral on the Smithfield Street side of the Smithfield-Liberty Garage is certainly a striking addition to the streetscape. Whether it is a good addition may be left to other critics. Father Pitt’s own opinion is that it would be welcome on a street of other modernist buildings, but it harmonizes poorly with its Victorian neighbors.
Old Pa Pitt sometimes wonders what the architect told the client when he presented the plans. “It’s like a Guggenheim for cars,” he imagines the architect saying.
The gleam of early-morning sun warms the chilly modernist elegance of Four Gateway Center. This 1960 modernist tower is one of a number of contributions to our skyline by Harrison & Abramovitz, whose most notable (which is to say inescapable) work in Pittsburgh is the U. S. Steel Tower.
Three Gateway Center (1952, architects Eggers & Higgins), seen down the western end of Forbes Avenue from the Diamond. The distinctive stainless-steel facing of the first three Gateway Center towers was an afterthought, and a very lucky one. They were to be faced with brick, which would have made them humdrum undistinguished vertical warehouses like a thousand other modernist cruciform brick towers around the world. But bricks were in short supply after the Second World War, and for once budget constraints led to a much more pleasing result.
