The Buhl Building, an earlier work of Benno Janssen, is covered with Wedgwood-style terra-cotta decorations. Below, the Market Street end of the building.
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Terra-Cotta Decorations on the Buhl Building
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Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building
We’ve already seen this building from the side and rear. Here is most of it from the front, with the Boulevard of the Allies ramp and the low roofline of Chinatown in the foreground. From this angle we can see, if we know its history, how the building was put up in two stages: the original was eight storeys tall, and then five more storeys (counting the top storey, which has no windows on the front) were added a decade later. That accounts for the unorthodox stripe of ornament across the middle, which used to be the cap of the building. But the architects, MacClure and Spahr, did such a good job of extending the building that, without knowing its history, we would never have guessed that the top floors were added later.
Addendum: According to an article in the Engineering News for January 18, 1917, the addition was planned when the original building was put up, so MacClure & Spahr had to create a building that would look complete at two stages. That’s how you separate the pros from the amateurs in the architecture business.
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Mayor Guthrie
George W. Guthrie was mayor of Pittsburgh when the Keenan Building was put up in 1907, and here is his face among the terra-cotta decorations on the building, where he keeps company with other prominent men of Pittsburgh. Pittsburghers remember Guthrie as the mayor who finally engineered the successful conquest of Allegheny, so North Siders sometimes think of him the way Ukrainians think of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps his most important accomplishment, though, was clean city water that, for the first time, brought typhoid under control in Pittsburgh, where it had been a scourge for the first century and a half of the city’s existence.
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Subway Crossing First Avenue
A Silver Line car crosses First Avenue on its way toward Steel Plaza. In the background, One Oxford Centre, the Grant Building, and the Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building.
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Jones and Laughlin Headquarters Building
This small skyscraper was not originally built as a skyscraper. The first part of it was put up in 1907; in 1917 five more storeys were added (very skillfully, we might add), bringing the building just about high enough to qualify as a small skyscraper in old Pa Pitt’s admittedly fluid definition of the term. The architects both times were MacClure & Spahr, who also gave us the Union National Bank Building and the Diamond Building, among others. Since 1952, this building has belonged to the city, which calls it the John P. Robin Civic Building.
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First Avenue Station
The distinctive undulating platform roofs of the First Avenue subway station, seen from across First Avenue.
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Try Street Terminal
The First Avenue face of the Try Street Terminal (now called Terminal 21 and filled with loft apartments and offices).
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Skyline Abstraction
Including parts of One Oxford Centre, the Grant Building, the Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building, and the Try Street Terminal.
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The Canyon
Looking eastward on Fourth Avenue from the intersection with Wood Street.
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PPG Place
A view looking south on what used to be Market Street before PPG Place took it over. The obelisk (or the Tomb of the Unknown Bowler, as Peter Leo liked to call it) is in the middle distance.
