Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • G. C. Murphy Buildings

    G. C. Murphy buildings

    It called itself “the world’s largest variety store,” and it was probably right about that. G. C. Murphy was a big chain of five-and-dime stores based in McKeesport, but the downtown Pittsburgh store was its biggest and most exciting. It had three floors of everything, including concessions rented out to everything from produce vendors to fortune tellers. The whole establishment occupied the corner of Forbes Avenue and the Diamond and went through the block to Fifth Avenue.

    The chain succumbed to corporate raiders in the 1980s, who exploited quirks of capitalist logic by driving the chain into bankruptcy and getting rich in the process. The downtown store contracted into a small part of its former empire, and then closed altogether.

    For a while the buildings sat empty. Now they have been restored to beautiful condition, and the Diamond is thriving again. Old Pa Pitt wishes he could have Murphy’s back, but time like an ever-rolling stream and all that.

  • Gateway Station

    Entrance to Gateway Station
    Another view

    Architect Rob Pfaffman gave us just about the most whimsical subway entrance old Pa Pitt has ever seen, and he has been places and seen things. The whole station is unique, above and below the ground. There are no right angles, or at least very few. Yet from a practical point of view, nothing is confusing, and the station works very well for its intended purpose, which is to get us into a trolley quickly.

    Silver Line car at Gateway Station

  • Kirkpatrick Building

    903 Liberty Avenue

    This pleasing Victorian Romanesque commercial building was probably pushing the limits of height for its era: it was built in 1884, just before the dawn of the skyscraper age. Skyscrapers had not yet posed the problem of how to treat floor after floor in the upward rise of a building; the solution, even in the most ornate Beaux-Arts skyscrapers, turned out to be to treat the middle floors as identical repetitions (compare the later Renshaw Building to the left). That has not been done here. There are eight floors, and each of them different in some way.

  • Three and Two Gateway Center

    Three and Two Gateway Center

  • 801 Liberty Avenue

    801 Liberty Avenue

    This meticulously restored storefront probably had workshops of some sort on the second and third floors: look how the windows are arranged to maximize the penetration of natural light as far back into the building as possible. In fact the current tenants on the second floor apparently find it too penetrating, to judge by the effort they have put into blocking it. In our age of ubiquitous electrical illumination, we forget what a problem lighting was in the old days. Gas lighting was dimmer than electric, and it produced much more heat even than incandescent lighting, which was a serious disadvantage in the summer. Thus free sunlight—or, in Pittsburgh, attenuated smog light—was zealously hoarded.

  • 411 Wood Street

    411 Wood Street

    This well-preserved pile of Victorian eclecticism dates from the Centennial year, as we can see by the date stone at the top. By that time Pittsburgh had grown into a large city and was rapidly becoming an industrial behemoth, and its prosperous merchants were eager to have buildings in the most up-to-date modern style.

    Date stone

  • Westinghouse Building

    Westinghouse Building

    Designed by Harrison & Abramowitz, who also gave us the markedly similar U. S. Steel Building, this is now known as 11 Stanwix Street. Above, from Gateway Center Park; below, from Mount Washington.

    11 Stanwix

  • 20 Stanwix Street

    Not one of our most spectacular buildings, but this 22-storey minor skyscraper, opened in 1982, was designed by a firm with a history of breaking records. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower), which was the tallest building in the world for quite a while; they also designed One World Trade Center, currently the tallest building in America, and the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building on earth. It is a huge firm with offices all over the globe, and Father Pitt does not imagine that this project got the same project leader as the Sears Tower.

    Addendum: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was also the firm responsible for Two PNC Plaza, formerly the Equibank Building. The lead architect on that project was Natalie de Blois, and when the building went up in 1974 it was the largest in the world designed by a woman. Another record!

  • Three and Two Gateway Center

  • Steel Plaza Subway Station

    Steel Plaza

    Steel Plaza was designed in the 1980s, and its architecture is an interesting combination of Brutalist and Postmodern styles—the two most prominent materials are raw concrete and polished granite. It was built as a junction station, where the main subway line met the spur to Penn Station, which is not in regular service these days. In the picture below, the main line is on the left, and the spur is on the right.

    Middle platform
    Looking across the main line
    A wider view
    Outbound platform from inbound platform