This picture has been manipulated on two planes to give the building a more natural perspective than is really possible in Pittsburgh’s narrow streets, at the cost of distorting a few other things.
The Mellons ordered a bank that would convey the impression of rock-solid stability. It was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, who would later design the even more imposing Federal Building and the Gulf Building, both also Mellon projects. (We call the Federal Building a Mellon project because Andrew W. Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury who specified it and wrote his name on it in bronze.) It was a Lord & Taylor department store for about four years in the early 2000s, for which the splendid interior was mostly destroyed. Later, PNC took it over as a call center, and restored some of the bits of interior that were left.
The front of this building from the 1920s has been subjected to a series of ill-conceived renovations, and it is about to get another one. This one will make a drastic change in its appearance by imposing a modern front that will make it look like an entirely different building—one in a 2020s style that will be embarrassingly passé in a few years. The good news is that the new front appears to be more or less disposable: it is simply covering the existing building (except for the parts on the ground floor that had already been rubbished by previous renovations), and a future owner will be able to peel it away and reveal the original building behind.
Although the subway spur to Penn Station is not in regular use, it is kept in working order for emergencies and special events. The subway downtown has been interrupted at Wood Street for track reconstruction, so trolleys are diverted to Penn Station, with a shuttle bus to Gateway.
The Keystone Athletic Club was designed by Benno Janssen, Pittsburgh’s favorite architect for high-class clubs of all sorts. Most of them were classical in style, but for this skyscraper clubhouse Janssen chose a simple and streamlined Gothic style instead. It is now Lawrence Hall, the main building of Point Park University, so that two universities in Pittsburgh have trademark Gothic skyscrapers.
Early in his career, Benno Janssen was a fiend for terra cotta; he was much more restrained later on, but he usually included some characteristically appropriate terra-cotta ornaments.
The Times Building, designed by Frederick Osterling in his Richardsonian Romanesque period, is a block deep, so it has fronts on both Fourth Avenue and Third Avenue. The Fourth Avenue front is narrower; the Third Avenue front has one more bay, and a single grand arch in the middle. The decorative carving is probably by Achille Giammartini, who is known to have worked with Osterling on the Marine Bank and the Bell Telephone Building, and all his trademark whimsy is on display here.
The County Office Building, which opened in 1931, was designed by Stanley L. Roush, who was the king of public works in Allegheny County for a while. Its combination of styles is unique in Pittsburgh, as far as old Pa Pitt knows. In form it is of the school Father Pitt likes to call American Fascist, the weighty classical style filtered through streamlined Art Deco that was popular for American public buildings between the World Wars, and of which the grandest example in Pittsburgh is the federal courthouse. But the details are Romanesque rather than classical—an acknowledgment of the lingering influence of the great Richardson’s greatest masterpiece, the Allegheny County Courthouse. The carved ornaments are Art Deco adaptations of medieval themes, except for the eagle above, which is not at all medieval, and which clasps the arms of Allegheny County in its talons.
The Fourth Avenue side. The County Office Building is roughly square, so the four sides are similar, except that this side lacks an entrance. But this was the side that was lit by the sun when Father Pitt was taking pictures. It took a lot of fiddling and adaptation to get the whole side of the building across a tiny narrow street, so you will see stitching errors and other anomalies if you enlarge the picture.
