Our two most splendid Art Deco skyscrapers, as seen from Crawford Street in the Hill. This view is made possible by the demolition of the old Civic Arena, and will disappear when the currently vacant lot is filled again.
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Koppers and Gulf Towers
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Litchfield Towers, Oakland
“Distinctive” is a good neutral term for these skyscraper dormitories that loom over the Oakland business district. The architect was Dahlen Ritchey, who designed three cylinders of unequal heights that he designated A, B, and C. Students quickly named them Ajax, Bab-O, and Comet.
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Strand Theatre Building, Oakland
[Update: We have more on the history of this building, which was the Natatorium Building before it became a theater.]
This once-splendid movie house on Forbes Avenue was designed by Harry S. Bair, a specialist in neighborhood movie palaces who also designed the Regent in East Liberty. According to comments on Cinematreasures.org, it was built with the screen at the street end: you had to walk up a long hall to come in at the rear of the theater. Thus it took advantage of the hillside location to make a naturally sloped auditorium. The building ceased to be a theater about four decades ago; it is now retail stores and apartments.
The picture above is a composite of four photographs.
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Mt. Lebanon Municipal Building
Mount Lebanon is a township, technically speaking; but it feels more like a city of its own. Post-Gazette columnist Peter Leo always referred to it as “the Great State of Mount Lebanon,” which sums up how Pittsburghers think Mount Lebanese think of themselves. The central business district is “uptown”—a word that means an area outside downtown in most cities (even Pittsburgh itself), but in southwestern Pennsylvania usually means a downtown area that happens to be on a hilltop. Uptown and the surrounding area is now a national historic district, and this 1930 Art Deco building is one of its gems: it is the masterpiece of its architect, William Henry King, Jr.
A decade-old article from the Trib has quite a bit of good information about the building.
Camera: Canon PowerShot S45. The picture of the whole building above is a composite of four photographs.
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U. S. Steel Tower
U. S. Steel is actually moving out of this tower to a new building to be constructed in its shadow, where the Civic Arena used to be. But this will always be the building that says “steel” on the skyline, or (depending on your opinion of the architecture) the building that says 2001: A Space Odyssey. When it opened in 1971, it was the tallest building outside New York and Chicago. Though there are many taller buildings now, it is still record-breakingly massive. There is no other building with a roof that big that high. All taller skyscrapers are narrower at the top; the U. S. Steel Tower is an acre on each floor and an acre on the roof. There is a good bit more office space in here than in the Empire State Building.
The architects were Harrison & Abramowitz, who also gave us the noticeably similar Westinghouse Building (now called 11 Stanwix) and the Alcoa Building (Regional Enterprise Tower for a while, but seems to be called something else now).
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Clifford B. Connelley Trade School
Now the home of the Energy Innovation Center, this grand old school on the brow of the Hill taught useful skills to generations of students. The architect was Edward B. Lee, who was a favorite school designer around here.
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The Encore on 7th
It’s likely that real architects look down on the firm of HKS, Inc., as a bunch of hacks who specialize in expensive projects for people with unenlightened taste. Unenlightened? Well, that’s old Pa Pitt in a nutshell! The Encore on 7th, externally, is very much to his taste. Since the architectural firm is known for monster projects like 311 South Wacker, the tallest building in the world whose name is its street address, this one was probably assigned to an unpaid intern. But it is a fine addition to the skyline: modern without losing the context of its location, and suitable for its location without losing its distinctiveness. The apartments inside are very expensive, but they have swell views.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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625 Stanwix Tower
This is an early work of Tasso Katselas, whose public buildings litter our landscape. Every generation seems to produce a favorite court architect, the darling of the Allegheny County nobility, and Tasso Katselas was that architect until his retirement about ten years ago.
This particular building, built in 1966 as Allegheny Towers, is on many short lists of the ugliest buildings downtown, and Father Pitt tends to agree with that assessment. It is a parking garage halfway up; then, on top of that, there is a stack of miscellaneous apartments that look as though someone piled them there temporarily, intending to slide them into a finished building later. There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation; the windows are random noise. Compare it to the one arm of the cool and elegant Two Gateway Center behind it and to the left, or the textured glass wall of PPG Place behind that, and its lack of harmony will be immediately apparent.
But Father Pitt would not have you dismiss Tasso Katselas on the basis of this one building, which is probably very comfortable for the residents. He has given us buildings Father Pitt loathes with a passion, and buildings Father Pitt loves with an immeasurable love. His Pittsburgh International Airport terminal is peerless: the best airport terminal Father Pitt has ever seen. It minimizes the distances between the farthest gates; it controls security easily (and remember that it was built at a time when security was not nearly so much of an obsession as it is now); and it is the only airport terminal Father Pitt knows where every word of the pages and announcements is clearly audible. How many times have you been in another airport and found yourself thinking, “I hope Mrnmkh Pthhrmrmpt recognizes his name, because I certainly don’t”? That never happens at Pitt, and it took some serious architectural thinking to make those acoustics happen.
And that is the thing that probably made Tasso Katselas’ career: his buildings may be beautiful or ugly, but they are almost always practical. They work very well for their intended purposes, because the architect has clearly taken accommodating those intended purposes as his first duty, rather than as a luxury that one might be able to afford after one has indulged one’s pet design obsessions.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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The Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburghers who remember the days before we had the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist will remember this as the Volkwein’s building, which housed one of the largest music stores in North America. (Volkwein’s moved to the western suburbs, where the tradition of carrying more music than anyone else continues.) But it was built as a warehouse for the Frick & Lindsay Company, a purveyor of “industrial supplies.” If warehouses were commonly as splendid as this, there would be regularly scheduled tours of the warehouse district.
No one knows who designed the original building, but in a Post-Gazette article from 1993 (when the building was under restoration), Walter Kidney suggests the William G. Wilkins Co. (Update: We have confirmed that the William G. Wilkins company were the architects.1 Specifically, the building seems to have been designed by Joseph F. Kuntz, who worked for Wilkins.) The details were originally in terra cotta, but the cornice had been entirely removed and other details were damaged. During the restoration, the cornice and some of the other decorations were reconstructed in glass-reinforced concrete from photographs, records, and imagination.
The Frick of Frick & Lindsay was William Frick, a distant relative of the famous robber baron Henry Clay Frick.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3. The picture of the whole building below is a composite from six photographs.
- Source: The Construction Record, January 13, 1912: “Architect William G. Wilkins Co., 200 Ninth street, have plans nearly completed for a six-story brick, terra cotta, steel and concrete warehouse to be constructed on Reliance street and Rose alley, Northside, for the Frick & Lindsay Company. Cost $90,000.” January 27, 1912: “Architects William G. Wilkins Company, 200 Ninth street, are taking bids on the foundations for a warehouse building, 103×110 feet, six stories and basement, to be built on Reliance and Sandusky streets, Northside, for the Frick & Lindsay Company, 109 Wood street. The building will be of brick and probably terra cotta, steel and reinforced concrete. Plans for the superstructure will be ready about February 1.” Rose Alley is now Silver Street; General Robinson Street was formerly Robinson Street; it must have been called “Reliance” very briefly when duplicate street names were eliminated in Pittsburgh and the new North Side, but the name does not show up in 1910 or 1923. ↩︎
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The Tower at PNC Plaza
“Earth’s greenest skyscraper” is getting closer and closer to completion. Here we see it in its current state.
Camera: Canon PowerShot S45.
