Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Mayor Guthrie

    Relief of 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.

  • Subway Crossing First Avenue

    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.

  • Jones and Laughlin Headquarters Building

    Jones & 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.

  • First Avenue Station

    First Avenue station

    The distinctive undulating platform roofs of the First Avenue subway station, seen from across First Avenue.

  • Try Street Terminal

    Try Street Terminal

    The First Avenue face of the Try Street Terminal (now called Terminal 21 and filled with loft apartments and offices).

  • Skyline Abstraction

    Patterns in the skyline

    Including parts of One Oxford Centre, the Grant Building, the Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building, and the Try Street Terminal.

  • The Canyon

    Looking eastward on Fourth Avenue

    Looking eastward on Fourth Avenue from the intersection with Wood Street.

  • PPG Place

    View of PPG Place from the Diamond

    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.

  • Fifth Avenue Place from the Diamond

    Fifth Avenue Place looms over the DFiamond

    Fifth Avenue Place looms over the low human-sized buildings on the Diamond.

  • Union National Bank Building

    Union National Bank Building

    Now converted to luxury apartments as “The Carlyle,” this classical Fourth Avenue bank tower was designed by the firm of MacClure and Spahr. Benno Janssen, who was working at the firm, is said to have had a large part in the design. It opened in 1906. Curiously, the building behind it, the Commonwealth Bank Building, was built at the same time and reached exactly the same height, 300 feet.