Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Fifth Avenue in the 1990s

    Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh

    Father Pitt is not quite sure when he took this picture (some of his records are in a sorry state of disorganization), but it is easy to give it a rough date. In the middle distance we can see the Farmers Bank Building, with its mural of Pittsburgh sports legends by Judy Penzer, an artist who had the good luck to be the sister of a real-estate developer, and the bad luck to be on TWA Flight 800 when it exploded in 1996. That mural was painted in 1992, and the building was imploded in 1997 to make way for the new Lazarus department store.

    The Farmers Bank Building was a great loss to our architectural legacy, but we could argue that it had been lost for three decades by the time it was demolished. It was built in 1903, one of our earliest batch of skyscrapers.

    Farmers Bank Building

    In the 1960s, the owners covered the embarrassingly passé Beaux-Arts exterior with a generic modernist shell, making the building indistinguishable from other International Style boxes except for being uglier. When the building was scheduled for demolition, there was some argument about whether the original exterior could be restored; but the indomitably bland personality of Mayor Murphy overcame all opposition to his project to fill downtown with department stores. Tom Murphy was a brilliant politician, probably the most powerful mayor since David Lawrence, but in this case he was badly misguided. Lazarus failed in a few years, and soon downtown went from four department stores to none at all.

  • Demmler Bros. Building

    Demmler Bros. Building

    Demmler Bros. (now Demmler Machinery) built its headquarters in the Romanesque style that was very popular for warehouses and industrial buildings; for other examples, see the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse and the B. M. Kramer & Company Building. The company has moved to the suburbs, but ghost signs still betray the origin of the building.

  • 111 Market Street

    111 Market Street

    An unusually simple cast-iron front adorns this five-storey commercial building, which is actually the tallest thing on its block of Market Street. It is possible that the building has lost a cornice, but otherwise it probably looks not much different from the way it looked when it was first put up around 1900 or so.

  • The Skyline in 1994

    Skyline of Pittsburgh

    When he took pictures of two halves of the skyline on Ektachrome film in 1994, old Pa Pitt had no notion of stitching them together. But it was an easy thing to do with our fancy 21st-century technology.

    Several prominent buildings have gone up since this picture was taken almost three decades ago, but the only one that makes a great difference in the appearance of the skyline is the Tower at PNC Plaza, which fills in a gap in the skyline just where a gap needed filling.

  • 105 Market Street

    105 Market Street

    Part of one humble block of Market Street between First Avenue and the Boulevard of the Allies that keeps alive the memory of Pittsburgh before the skyscraper age, this matched pair of simple storefronts (with living quarters above, no doubt) has changed very little since it was built. Unfortunately the buildings on the other side of Market Street are scheduled for demolition, probably to be replaced by skyscraper loft apartments—unless preservationists win their quixotic battle to keep the increasingly dilapidated old buildings. But at least this side of Market seems safe for now.

  • 228 First Avenue

    228 First Avenue

    Does anyone know the architect or the history of this building? Father Pitt put in almost fifteen minutes of work trying to find out something about it, but nothing came up in his searches. It is a particularly elegant little façade, and right now you can buy it and preserve it for future generations.

  • Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse

    Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse

    A particularly elegant Romanesque warehouse built for the company that made bathroom plumbing fashion-conscious. Standard later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard, still a leader in toilet technology today. The building is now luxurious offices under the name “Fort Pitt Commons.” According to the boundary-increase application for the Firstside Historic district, it was built 1900–1905; the architect is unknown, which is a pity, because it was obviously someone with a real sense of rhythm in architecture. (If you backed old Pa Pitt into a corner and asked him to guess the architect, he might say Charles Bickel, whose Reymer Brothers candy factory Uptown is very similar in many details, including the treatment of the arches.) Above, the side that faces Fort Pitt Boulevard and the Mon; below, the First Avenue side.

  • Penn Station in 2001

    Penn Station

    It was officially the Union Station, but there was no real union: the other important railroads (the B&O, the P&LE, the Wabash) had their own stations. Most Pittsburghers knew this as the Penn Station for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which owned it and ran most of the trains. Although this view was taken in 2001, little has changed: already the building was high-class apartments, and already the trains came into a dumpy little modern station grafted on the back. Here, on a day of patchy clouds, the afternoon sun shines a spotlight on the station’s most famous feature: the rotunda, one of Daniel Burnham’s most famous architectural achievements, so distinctive that it has its own separate listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

  • Skinny Building Under Wraps

    Skinny Building shrouded

    The Skinny Building and its neighbor the Roberts Building have been bought by PNC. Here they are shrouded for renovation work. The last old Pa Pitt heard, PNC was planning on displaying art in the upper windows of the Skinny Building.

  • Try Street

    Try Street

    There are few entirely indoor streets in Pittsburgh, but this is one of them: Try Street, after which the Try Street Terminal is named. The street is entirely covered by the subway viaduct leading north from the First Avenue station. In other words, Try Street is a kind of subway under the subway. Here we see it from the First Avenue exit; metal doors along the right-hand side lead into the Try Street Terminal.