Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • 6th and Penn Garage

    6th and Penn Garage

    Connoisseurs of brutalism in architecture regard this as a remarkably fine example of the style. (Father Pitt could not find the architect with a short search, and he was not willing to do a long one.) “Brutalism” is the modernist school that makes its aesthetic statements through exposed raw concrete. The “raw” part is very important here: the architectural world blew a collective gasket when, in Washington, D.C., the Metro authorities responded to the increasing grubbiness of 1970s Brutalist subway stations by painting over the grime, which was blasphemy. Old Pa Pitt is not a great lover of brutalism (except for the Metro stations in Washington, which are like modernist cathedrals), but he can appreciate the care that went into making the most of concrete as a material in this building—the curved surfaces, the geometric forms, the play of light and shadow. It is also notable that, instead of killing the whole block, the builder put storefronts on the ground floor, so that some life could remain on the streets below the garage.

  • House Building

    House Building

    Now known as Four Smithfield Street, this early skyscraper was designed by James T. Steen and opened in 1902.

    House Building

  • Meyer Jonasson & Co. Building

    File:Meyer Jonasson & Co. building

    Now called just 606 Liberty Avenue, this was once a high-class department store. The odd-shaped building was designed by MacClure & Spahr, who gave us many distinguished buildings downtown. The odd shape was forced on this one by the oblique angle of the intersection of Liberty and Oliver Avenues. That last block of Oliver Avenue was later filled in to make PNC Plaza, but this building memorializes the intersection that used to be.

    Arch

    The front on both streets is covered—perhaps the appropriate word is festooned—with terra-cotta decorations. The style is a kind of fantasy Jacobean Renaissance, with wide arches coming to a very shallow not-quite point. Old James I only wished he could have buildings like this in his realm.

    Terra-cotta olive and oak and acanthus
    More terra cotta
    Terra cotta
    Entrance
    Lion head
    Light fixture
    Reflections of the arches

    The arches reflected in Two PNC Plaza next door.

    From the sidewalk on the same side of the street

  • Firstside

    Firstside

    The little human-sized buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard originally faced the Monongahela Wharf, where the steamboats lined up.

    Firstside

  • Fort Duquesne Bridge

    Fort Duquesne Bridge

    With November colors in Point State Park.

    The bridge again
    From a slightly different angle

  • Conestoga Building

    Designed by Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow, this was our first steel-cage building and thus the seed from which dozens of skyscrapers grew.

  • November Skyline

    Pittsburgh skyline with gold colors of November
    November colors on Mount Washington

  • Investment Building

    Top of the Investment Building

    Built in 1927, this Fourth Avenue tower was designed by John M. Donn, a Washington architect known for government buildings who seems not to have done anything else around here. (Update: This is incorrect; Donn also designed the Cathedral Mansions apartments in Shadyside.) The curious ornamental obelisks at the corners of the cap were the inspiration for Philip Johnson’s Tomb of the Unknown Bowler down the street.

    Investment Building
    From a different angle

  • 151 First Side

    151 First Side

    An eighteen-storey condominium tower built in 2007. Back then, only fifteen years ago, it was the first condominium tower put up in downtown Pittsburgh in nearly forty years. It proved that such an enterprise could be profitable.

  • Gateway Center

    Gateway Center

    The Point was mostly a run-down warehouse district after the Second World War, which made it an ideal showcase for the modernist ideal of urban redevelopment. The part nearest the confluence of the rivers was set aside for a park (which took a quarter-century to realize), and the rest was demolished to make way for gleaming modern towers. It was a great success, and it probably did untold damage here and in other cities. Its success convinced a generation of urban planners that the key to prosperous development was to replace crowded urban districts with sterile modern towers. It almost never worked; Gateway Center was a lucky anomaly, and old Pa Pitt would suggest that the park and landscaping had more to do with its success than the architecture of the buildings—although he does think the three original Gateway Center towers (the silver cruciform towers in the middle right of this picture) are masterpieces of their kind. That, too, was a lucky accident: they were meant to be sheathed in brick, which would have made them pedestrian stacks of offices, but postwar shortages made it more economical to give them the gleaming metal surfaces you see here.