Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Brutalist Spiral on Smithfield Street

    This concrete spiral on the Smithfield Street side of the Smithfield-Liberty Garage is certainly a striking addition to the streetscape. Whether it is a good addition may be left to other critics. Father Pitt’s own opinion is that it would be welcome on a street of other modernist buildings, but it harmonizes poorly with its Victorian neighbors.

    Old Pa Pitt sometimes wonders what the architect told the client when he presented the plans. “It’s like a Guggenheim for cars,” he imagines the architect saying.

  • Keenan Building

    The Keenan Building in bright early-morning sunshine, seen from Sixth Avenue.

  • Decoration on the Liberty Theater

    The classical building at Liberty Avenue and Strawberry Way was built originally as the Liberty Theater in 1913. It lasted only ten years as a theater before being converted to office space as the Baum Building.

  • Four Gateway Center

    The gleam of early-morning sun warms the chilly modernist elegance of Four Gateway Center. This 1960 modernist tower is one of a number of contributions to our skyline by Harrison & Abramovitz, whose most notable (which is to say inescapable) work in Pittsburgh is the U. S. Steel Tower.

  • Three Gateway Center

    Three Gateway Center (1952, architects Eggers & Higgins), seen down the western end of Forbes Avenue from the Diamond. The distinctive stainless-steel facing of the first three Gateway Center towers was an afterthought, and a very lucky one. They were to be faced with brick, which would have made them humdrum undistinguished vertical warehouses like a thousand other modernist cruciform brick towers around the world. But bricks were in short supply after the Second World War, and for once budget constraints led to a much more pleasing result.

  • Cast-Iron Storefronts on Wood Street

    Cast-iron building fronts were made in Pittsburgh for cities everywhere, but according to the architectural historian Franklin Toker they were actually less popular in Pittsburgh than elsewhere. Here, however, are three splendid identical examples. They were carefully restored in 2013, using fiberglass to duplicate missing pieces of the iron.

  • Layers of History

    A change of tenants in this Victorian building on Liberty Avenue reveals an earlier layer of signs—one that makes old Pa Pitt wax nostalgic. For many years there was a Foto Hut here. Foto Hut was a chain of photography stores where amateur photographers could get all the basics for photography—including, of course, film and film developing. Digital photography is much cheaper, but Father Pitt still misses film.

  • Lions on the People’s Savings Bank Tower

    These distinctive lion heads hold up the arch of the tympanum over the Wood Street entrance to the People’s Savings Bank tower.

  • Heinz Hall

    One of the first great silent movie palaces (the old Loew’s Penn) to be turned into a concert hall, Heinz Hall set a trend, both here and elsewhere. With the old Stanley and Fulton (now the Benedum and Byham), it is one of the three large anchors of the theater district downtown.

  • Tympanum on the People’s Savings Bank

    John Massey Rhind, the famous sculptor who did the four representatives of the Noble Quartet outside the Carnegie and the Robert Burns statue outside Phipps Conservatory, contributed decorative reliefs to the 1901 People’s Savings Bank tower on Fourth Avenue. This one is over the Wood Street entrance.