Still Pittsburgh’s largest hotel, this opened in 1959 as the Pittsburgh Hilton. It was designed by William Tabler, the Hilton company’s pet architect. Originally it was, as James D. Van Trump told us in The Stones of Pittsburgh, “partially sheathed in panels of gold anodized aluminum, very appropriate to a luxury hotel.” The panels have been painted over.
The addition to the front opened in 2014; it does not seem to go with the rest of the building.
As some vast heart that high in health
Beats in its mighty breast,
So, to and fro, thy living wealth
Throbs through the boundless West.
Thy keels the broad Ohio plow,
Or seek the Atlantic main;
Thy fabrics find the Arctic snow,
Or reach Zahara’s plain!
Toil on, huge Cyclop as thou art,
Though grimed with dust and smoke,
And breathing with convulsive start—
There’s music in each stroke!
What if the stranger smirch and soil
Upon thy forehead sees?
Better the wealth of honest toil
Than of ignoble ease!
And yet thou’rt beautiful—a queen
Throned on her royal seat!
All glorious in emerald sheen,
Where thy fair waters meet.
And when the night comes softly down,
And the moon lights the stream,
In the mild ray appears the town,
The city of a dream!
——“Pittsburgh” by E. M. Sidney in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, Vol. XXX (1847), p. 249.
The decorated cornice of the Horne’s building gleams in late-afternoon sun.
This is a rather grandly named bus station and parking garage. It’s certainly a striking building to look at; it was designed by IKM, descended from the grand old firm of Ingham & Boyd. There ought to be someone in the crow’s nest at the top of the tower to shout “Bus ho!” whenever a Greyhound is sighted.
The Wood Street end of the Granite Building in a composite photograph that gets a little fuzzy toward the top, but otherwise gives us a good notion of the design of the Romanesque extravaganza. It was built in 1889 as the German National Bank; the architects were Bickel & Brennan—the Bickel being Charles Bickel, who would go one to become Pittsburgh’s most prolific architect of commercial buildings.
We also have pictures of some of Achille Giammartini’s carvings on the building, and of the German National Bank ghost signs still visible on the side that faces Liberty Avenue.
Looming behind Duquesne University on the Bluff.
The gleaming modernist towers of Gateway Center in afternoon sunshine.
Did you notice how Father Pitt did not slow down the shutter speed for the flowing water, the way every photography site on the Internet dogmatically insists you must do it? Did you notice the fascinating patterns of falling water that were captured by the deliberately fast shutter? Are you ready yet to abandon the dentist’s-office-wall-decor cliché of slow shutter speeds for waterfalls and fountains? You can join the rebel alliance!
The picture above is made from three separate photographs at different exposures, which gives us a better range of detail—but it also adds to the complexity of the play of falling water. To approximate the golden color of the late-afternoon sunshine, it was then put through a simulated Kodachrome 64 filter, with many thanks to the obsessive fiddler who did his best to match the color and light response of Kodachrome film so that the rest of us can have at least an echo of that Kodachrome look. Since Kodachrome has been extinct for fifteen years, this is as much as we can do.
Gateway Towers was designed by Emery Roth & Sons. It was built in 1964, which tells us that it was the & Sons who were responsible for it, since Emery Roth died in 1948.
From a distance, this has never been one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite buildings to look at, although he is going to give it a fair chance by presenting multiple angles. Up close, however, it has a sharp classicism in its spare details that makes it much more attractive.
Good landscaping helps a lot, and all of Gateway Center has very good landscaping. The modernist ideal of towers in a park was never better implemented, and it is because the park part of the scheme was not neglected.
