Dowler & Dowler, father-and-son architects, designed this building for the Bell System’s western headquarters in Pennsylvania. We have seen the building from this angle before, but we have not seen it with a bus coming toward you, which is always an improvement.
The Stanwix Street front has a Miesian colonnaded porch, with a cheerful abstract mosaic ceiling.
Those cheerful square polka dots also show up in other parts of the building.
The cornerstone, with its late-Art-Deco lettering and date.
Though credited to Eggers & Higgins in most guides to Pittsburgh architecture, the Le Corbusier–style cruciform-towers-in-a-park design was the work of Irwin Clavan. According to Franklin Toker, “The design of these cruciform towers represented a tug-of-war between the traditionalists Eggers and Higgins, former partners of John Russell Pope (Eggers was also a major force in building the Pentagon), and the more progressive Clavan, who in the same years designed cruciform-tower housing estates in New York on the model of Le Corbusier’s 1922 towers-in-the-park scheme for Paris. Between seven and fifteen cruciform towers were originally projected, in traditional brick and limestone. At the last minute the designs were respecified for stainless steel, but scarcities during the Korean War required that chrome-alloyed steel be substituted.”1
Old Pa Pitt does not know whether the last-minute substitution of steel was a matter of cost or aesthetics, but it made all the difference in the world. Like most big cities, Pittsburgh is littered with postwar brick cruciform apartment towers. They are not missed if they go away. But the glimmering steel face of the Gateway Center towers makes them unique and attractive. They catch the light and throw it back in constantly shifting patterns throughout the day. The steel lifts these towers out of the bland and forgettable, and we should appreciate how lucky we are to have it.
The Market Street end of Three PNC Plaza, which opened in 2009. It is tied with Three Gateway Center as our twentieth-tallest building, and it was the tallest thing built in Pittsburgh in the long skyscraper drought between the 1980s boom and the current crop of skyscrapers. The architects were Gensler and Lou Astorino.
The modernist ideal of towers in a park often runs up against the unwillingness of developers to put any resources into the park part. Gateway Center is a notable exception. The park has always been beautifully maintained, and it was planted with an eye on the long term, so that the saplings planted decades ago have grown into a forest of mature trees in the middle of the forest of towers.
Part of the flamboyantly Art Deco G. C. Murphy building, which with this addition grew into “the world’s largest variety store,” as it still called itself in the 1990s before it shrank and the whole chain eventually collapsed under the ownership of Meshulam Riklis. The building was designed by Harold E. Crosby.
The terra-cotta decorations were originally brightly colored. In the photograph above, we have boosted the color to make the remaining colors evident.
The Pittsburgher was built in 1929–1930 as a hotel; the architects were the H. L. Stevens Company of New York. For many years, converted to offices, it was known as the Lawyers Building. In 2015 it was bought by a company called King Penguin Opportunity Fund, which restored the original name and put it in lights at the top. This view was taken from Gateway Center with a very long lens.
Tasso Katselas designed this mixed-use building, an apartment tower on top of a parking garage. It opened in 1966. For a while it was known by its address as 625 Stanwix Tower. Now it has been refurbished and given a spiffy new coat of black, which makes a big difference in its appearance. Compare the picture old Pa Pitt took from across the Allegheny nine years ago:
Back then, Father Pitt was a bit harsh in his criticism: “There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation,” he wrote. But the new coat of black emphasizes the vertical lines and gives the building exactly the rhythm it was missing—which turns out to be a jazzy syncopation.
