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Three Gateway Center from Forbes Avenue
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Equibank Building
Now known as Two PNC Plaza, this building held an interesting architectural record. It was designed by Natalie de Blois (or DeBlois;1 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.
- As it is spelled in the SAH Archipedia article on PNC Plaza. ↩︎
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Top of the Gulf Tower
The Gulf Tower is one of those buildings of the style old Pa Pitt calls “Mausoleum-on-a-stick,” where a skyscraper ends in a top modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Trowbridge and Livingston, who designed the Gulf Tower (with Edward Mellon as local architect of record), were the originators of the style, as far as Father Pitt can determine: the Gulf Tower is a Moderne reimagining of their original Mausoleum-on-a-Stick, the Bankers Trust Company Building on Wall Street, New York.
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Decorations by Achille Giammartini on the German National Bank
The German National Bank—now the Granite Building—is one of the most ornately Romanesque constructions ever put up in a city that was wild for Romanesque. The architect was Charles Bickel, but much of the effect of the building comes from the lavish and infinitely varied stonecarving of Achille Giammartini, Pittsburgh’s favorite decorator of Romanesque buildings.
We have sixteen more pictures in this article, and this is only a beginning. Old Pa Pitt will have to return several more times with his long lens to document Giammartini’s work on this building.
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Fifth Avenue
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819 and 821 Penn Avenue
A pair of commercial buildings with striking terra-cotta details—especially No. 819, on the left. The huge windows would have allowed light to pour into workshops on the upper floors.
Truly enlightened zoning regulations would mandate cornices with lions’ heads on all buildings more than four storeys tall.
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Three Rivers Arts Festival
This year the Artists’ Market was moved to Fort Duquesne Boulevard, which felt much less claustrophobic than last year’s location on Penn Avenue. To judge by the crowds, it was a big success.
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Squonk Performs Hand to Hand
Thirty years ago, Squonk Opera was a struggling alternative band performing in the standard struggling-local-band venues. But at some point early on, the group discovered that they could actually succeed by rebranding themselves as performance artists and getting commissions from arts organizations. Since then the “wacky provincial opera company,” now calling itself just Squonk, has been a regular at artsy events all over the world, but especially the Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Jackie Dempsey, keyboards, is one of the two original members of Squonk. Steve O’Hearn, who plays a variety of implausible wind instruments, is the other. Squonk will be performing Hand to Hand on Sunday, June 11, at 2:00 p.m. and again at 4:00 p.m. They claim that these are the world’s largest puppet hands, and who is going to argue?
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Setting Sun
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Three PNC Plaza
Designed by Lou Astorino, this is our twentieth-tallest skyscraper (tied with Three Gateway Center), which is not a remarkable record. It was, however, the tallest building that went up in Pittsburgh during the long pause between the 1980s boom and the current boom that began with the construction of the Tower at PNC Plaza. The somewhat taller building to the right is One PNC Plaza, built in 1972 to a design by Welton Becket Associates.
