Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Art Deco Vegetation

    A decorative panel on a building on Forbes Avenue seems to capture the spirit of medieval decoration filtered through an Art Deco lens.

  • Skyscrapers in the Mist

    A misty morning downtown gives us this abstract composition with a little touch of mystery.

  • Three Gateway Center from the Diamond

    Three Gateway Center looms in the mist of a winter morning.

  • Forbes Avenue Side of the Frick Building

    Louis Sullivan was of the opinion that Daniel Burnham’s success in the classical style was a great blow to American architecture. But what could be more American than a Burnham skyscraper? Like America, it melds its Old World influences into an entirely new form, in its way as harmonious and dignified as a Roman basilica, but without qualification distinctly American.

  • The Roberts Building and Its Neighbor

    The Roberts Building was put up for a jeweler, and its gem-like attention to detail seems appropriate.

    Some of the happiest carved lions in Pittsburgh adorn the cornice.

    These decorative tiles suggest the jeweler’s art.

    An amusing game to play with out-of-town visitors is to offer to show them an invisible building. Explain that you will make an invisible building visible before their eyes; then take them to the northeast corner of Wood Street and Forbes Avenue. Ask your visitors to describe the building on the opposite corner. They will almost invariably describe the Roberts Building. Then explain that they have described, not the building on the corner, but the building next to it. The building on the corner is invisible to them, because their brains have no category for a building that is five feet two inches wide.

    This is the Skinny Building, and once it has revealed itself to you, you will see that it is indeed a completely different building. It was built as an act of spite by a property owner whose property was rendered apparently worthless by street widening. The ground floor usually sells T-shirts and Pittsburgh souvenirs; various attempts are made at various times to find a use for the upper floors.

    Addendum: The architect of the Roberts Building was George M. Rowland; it was built in 1925.1

    1. Our source is the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation’s walking tour of the Market Square area (PDF). ↩︎

  • Castle in the Air

    The back side of the People’s Savings Bank building is merely functional, except for this curious stairwell, whose bronze cap seems to have flown in from another and much more fantastical world.

  • Regal Shoe Company

    This oddly domestic-looking storefront is made for a high-class tenant, and has found the perfect match in Heinz Healey’s haberdashery. The building was designed by Alden & Harlow, whose usual good taste is apparent.

  • Fifth Wood Building

    This is classicism walking the knife edge between Art Deco on the one side and modernism on the other. The architect was George H. Schwan, a Pittsburgher whose only other major commission in town that old Pa Pitt knows about is the Twentieth Century Club in Oakland. [Update: The Twentieth Century Club is usually attributed to Benno Janssen. Schwan may also have designed the Natatorium Building in Oakland, or the renovations that made it into a movie theater.] Schwan did not starve, however: he was a much-employed designer of attractive smaller houses, and his most famous commission was designing practically all the original buildings in the model Akron suburb of Goodyear Heights.

    Addendum: Father Pitt knows of more works by Schwan than he did when he wrote this article. See the Great Big List of Buildings and Architects for old Pa Pitt’s latest research.

  • Beckert Seed & Bulb Co.

    This old sign is still fairly clear on the back of a peculiarly triangular building on Liberty Avenue. You can see it from the Diamond; it’s just off Forbes Avenue over the little alley called Delray Street.

  • Standard Life Building

    This Fourth Avenue tower is smaller than some of the others, but just as splendid as its most ostentatious neighbors. It was designed by Alden and Harlow in their usual exquisite taste.