As seen from the entrance to the Gateway subway station.
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Horne’s Christmas Tree
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U. S. Steel Tower from Grant Street
With the aid of a very wide-angle lens, we can see the whole face of the tallest building in Pittsburgh from Grant Street. This was a very tall building when it was put up: it was the eighth-tallest in the world, and the tallest outside New York and Chicago. Now it doesn’t crack the top two hundred, but it is still record-breakingly massive in one way: no other building has a roof that big that high. Other tall buildings taper; this one goes straight up.
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Coffey Way
Looking toward Sixth Avenue.
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Parish House, Trinity Cathedral
We are used to seeing Trinity Cathedral from the Sixth Avenue front. At the rear of the lot on Oliver Avenue is a complex of buildings that form a Perpendicular Gothic wall along the street. The Parish House in the middle was designed by Carpenter & Crocker; and since the parts all match in style, we may attribute the whole complex to the same architects with some confidence. The treatment of the broad late-English-Gothic arches is very similar to that on Carpenter & Crocker’s Church of the Holy Cross in Homewood.
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Roofscape
Roof, tower, and spire of Trinity Cathedral and part of the Kaufmann & Baer department store (later Gimbels, and now the Heinz 57 Center).
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Oliver Building
The Oliver Building, designed by Daniel Burnham, was the tallest building in Pittsburgh when it was put up in 1910, passing Alden & Harlow’s Farmer’s Bank Building (destroyed in 1997, or arguably thirty years earlier when it was given a fake-modern skin). Only two years later, though, it was passed by Daniel Burnham’s own First National Bank Building (destroyed in 1968 to make way for a modernist skyscraper barely any taller).
The front of the Oliver Building still produces an impression of absolute massiveness, spanning an entire block with a 348-foot-tall wall. The rear, on the other hand, is where the light wells are, which divide the building into three narrower towers, changing the impression to one of loftiness rather than massiveness.
Your eyes are not being fooled by a trick of perspective: the section on the right really does extend a little further toward us than the other two.
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Alcoa Building
The Alcoa Building, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz and built in 1953, was supposed to revolutionize skyscraper design.1 It didn’t, but it had some interesting innovations—swivel windows that could be cleaned from the inside, for example, and of course its aluminum cladding, which was in effect a huge billboard advertising Alcoa’s product. This building did have one important and lasting effect on Pittsburgh: it brought Harrison & Abramovitz into the city, and our skyline would certainly be very different without their work.
Alcoa moved across the Allegheny in 1998, and for a while this was called the Regional Enterprise Tower, but now it holds luxury apartments instead of offices and is calling itself the Alcoa Building again—or, to give the marketers’ full name for it, the Residences at the Historic Alcoa Building.
To old Pa Pitt this building always looks like a stack of 1950s television sets.
- See this article on Mellon Square at the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia. ↩︎
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Skyline from the Veterans Bridge
The only safe way to get this picture is to have a chauffeur do the driving. The Veterans Bridge is old Pa Pitt’s favorite bridge for crossing the Allegheny, because it is the only one from which he cannot see the Veterans Bridge.
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How to Improve a Design by Alden & Harlow
Here is how the Land Trust Company building (later the Commercial National Bank) looked in 1905:
From Palmer’s Pictorial Pittsburgh. And here is how it looks today:
Much better, isn’t it?
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Rosary March
Yesterday’s Rosary March comes up Sixth Avenue. It’s not a very good picture, but old Pa Pitt was not expecting this colorful procession, and did what he could in the seconds he had to record the event from the window of a moving vehicle.
