Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Alcoa Building

    Alcoa Building from Mellon Square

    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.

    1. See this article on Mellon Square at the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia. ↩︎

  • 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.

  • How to Improve a Design by Alden & Harlow

    Here is how the Land Trust Company building (later the Commercial National Bank) looked in 1905:

    Land Trust Company
    From Palmer’s Pictorial Pittsburgh.

    And here is how it looks today:

    Land Trust Company today

    Much better, isn’t it?

  • 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.

  • Point Fountain

  • Fifth Avenue Place

  • Downtown from the North Shore

  • The Liberty Theater As It Was Built

    Update: Once in a while old Pa Pitt has a chance to boast about his architectural instincts, and here is one of those occasions. In the original article, he wrote that he suspected Edward B Lee of having designed the remodeling of the theater into an office building. He was right. Source: The American Contractor, December 15, 1923: “Store & Office Bldg. (remod. from theater): $150,000. 5 sty. & bas. H. tile. Liberty av. & Strawberry Alley. Archt. E. B. Lee, Chamber of Commerce bldg. Owner The Fidelity Title & Trust Co., Wilson A. Shaw, chrm. of bd., 343 Fourth av. Gen. contr. let to Cuthbert Bros., Bessemer bldg.”

    The original text of Father Pitt’s article follows.

    Edward B. Lee was the architect of the Liberty Theater—or Theatre, as theatrical people often insist on spelling it—when it was built in 1912. These pictures were published in The Brickbuilder in 1913, so they show the theater as it was when it was new. Either the theater failed or the owners decided it would be more profitable as an office building, because only eleven years later, in 1924,1 it was remodeled into the Baum Building, and it still stands today.

    The shell and outlines are the same, but quite a bit was changed externally. Old Pa Pitt suspects that Lee was the architect of these changes, too, and they were accomplished so elegantly that we would never know the building had not been planned that way from the beginning.

    These small drawings (orchestra, first balcony, second balcony) show the aggressive adaptations Mr. Lee had to make to the irregular shape of the lot—a common difficulty for buildings on the southeast side of Liberty Avenue, where the two grids of the irrationally rationalistic eighteenth-century street plan collide.

    Detail over the entrance. These decorations disappeared when the building was converted to offices.

    Corner detail. The cornice and pilasters survive, but the elaborate terra-cotta decoration between the pilasters vanished in 1924.

    1. In the original version of this article, Father Pitt had given the date as 1920, following a city architectural survey. The listing from the American Contractor proves that the date was actually no earlier than 1924. ↩︎

  • Three Gateway Center from Forbes Avenue

  • Equibank Building

    Now known as Two PNC Plaza, this building held an interesting architectural record. It was designed by Natalie de Blois (or DeBlois; old Pa Pitt sees it spelled both ways, and he is not willing to pay a spirit medium to contact the architect) for the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and when it opened in 1974 it was the largest building in the world ever designed by a woman. A block of Oliver Avenue was eliminated to make room for this skyscraper, but Oliver Avenue was never much of a street anyway.