The Market Street end of Three PNC Plaza, which opened in 2009. It is tied with Three Gateway Center as our twentieth-tallest building, and it was the tallest thing built in Pittsburgh in the long skyscraper drought between the 1980s boom and the current crop of skyscrapers. The architects were Gensler and Lou Astorino.
The modernist ideal of towers in a park often runs up against the unwillingness of developers to put any resources into the park part. Gateway Center is a notable exception. The park has always been beautifully maintained, and it was planted with an eye on the long term, so that the saplings planted decades ago have grown into a forest of mature trees in the middle of the forest of towers.
Part of the flamboyantly Art Deco G. C. Murphy building, which with this addition grew into “the world’s largest variety store,” as it still called itself in the 1990s before it shrank and the whole chain eventually collapsed under the ownership of Meshulam Riklis. The building was designed by Harold E. Crosby.
The terra-cotta decorations were originally brightly colored. In the photograph above, we have boosted the color to make the remaining colors evident.
The Pittsburgher was built in 1929–1930 as a hotel; the architects were the H. L. Stevens Company of New York. For many years, converted to offices, it was known as the Lawyers Building. In 2015 it was bought by a company called King Penguin Opportunity Fund, which restored the original name and put it in lights at the top. This view was taken from Gateway Center with a very long lens.
Tasso Katselas designed this mixed-use building, an apartment tower on top of a parking garage. It opened in 1966. For a while it was known by its address as 625 Stanwix Tower. Now it has been refurbished and given a spiffy new coat of black, which makes a big difference in its appearance. Compare the picture old Pa Pitt took from across the Allegheny nine years ago:
Back then, Father Pitt was a bit harsh in his criticism: “There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation,” he wrote. But the new coat of black emphasizes the vertical lines and gives the building exactly the rhythm it was missing—which turns out to be a jazzy syncopation.
Some seldom-seen details at the top of the Fulton Building (now the Renaissance Hotel), including an oddly incongruous television aerial.
Only nine years ago, the Skinny Building was restored—the upper floors, at any rate. The ground floor was linked with the building next door as part of a convenience store with an unattractive modern front. Now the building has been thoroughly re-restored, along with its neighbor the Roberts Jewelry building, and both have been given individual ground-floor treatments more in sympathy with their upper floors. PNC, which now owns both buildings, has made good on its pledge to restore them and display art in the upper floors of the Skinny Building.
Sometimes the false is truer than the true. It is not possible to get a good picture of One PNC Plaza from the ground. The only way to get in the whole building—well, almost the whole building—was to stitch together multiple pictures, which produced a hideously distorted perspective. To create a rendering that looks more like what we perceive (which is not the same as what we see) when we look at the building, old Pa Pitt resorted to complicated trickery for the picture above, making four vertical slices of the picture and adjusting each one of them separately. If you look at the ground level, you can see how everything else has been broken and distorted to make the building look more like itself.
Here is the base of the building without the radical distortions.
One PNC Plaza was designed by Welton Becket and Associates; it opened in 1972. Mr. Becket died at the beginning of 1969; but it is probable that he left drawings of this building on his drafting table, since it had been planned before 1968. The firm continued under his name long after his death; One Mellon Center, which opened in 1980, was also designed by Welton Becket and Associates.
It is a curious fact that One PNC Plaza replaced another skyscraper that was shorter by only four floors: the First National Bank Building, which was designed by Daniel Burnham and ranks at number 35 on Wikipedia’s “List of tallest voluntarily demolished buildings.” It is the tallest building destroyed in Pittsburgh so far.
