The Pittsburgh Party Pedaler is a kind of mobile bar bus powered by drinkers pedaling while they sit on barstools. The employee who steers, however, is required to remain sober.
There are at least two companies operating similar vehicles. This vehicle is Dutch and purely human-powered; Pedal Power Tours has a similar vehicle with a motor to help out when the drinkers get pooped.
One Gateway Center seen from across the Allegheny. The three Gateway Center towers were one of the most-watched developments in postwar America; it seemed as though the modernist ideal of towers-in-a-park would finally obliterate congestion and unpleasantness in our cities, and the original plan was to cover the whole Point with identical towers. Fortunately money ran out long before that happened. Money concerns also spared us at the last minute from the pedestrian brick cladding that was planned for these towers; it proved cheaper to encase them in shimmering metal. The result is an International Style cruciform tower with a bit of the elegance of Art Deco.
Eggers & Higgins, the architects, were the successors to John Russell Pope, and thus responsible for completing the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. Clearly they were stylistically versatile.
Designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, this is now the Renaissance Hotel. The entrance to the Byham Theater is on the Sixth Street side of the building; the theater is actually a different building next door, the entrance being a long passage all the way through the Fulton Building.
The grand arch in the light well seems to echo the arch of the Roberto Clemente Bridge—a coincidence, since the bridge was put up about twenty years later. It is a pleasure to see an architect making the light well a feature rather than hiding it in the rear as if he were ashamed of it.
Our two most splendid Art Deco skyscrapers, as seen from Crawford Street in the Hill. This view is made possible by the demolition of the old Civic Arena, and will disappear when the currently vacant lot is filled again.
U. S. Steel is actually moving out of this tower to a new building to be constructed in its shadow, where the Civic Arena used to be. But this will always be the building that says “steel” on the skyline, or (depending on your opinion of the architecture) the building that says 2001: A Space Odyssey. When it opened in 1971, it was the tallest building outside New York and Chicago. Though there are many taller buildings now, it is still record-breakingly massive. There is no other building with a roof that big that high. All taller skyscrapers are narrower at the top; the U. S. Steel Tower is an acre on each floor and an acre on the roof. There is a good bit more office space in here than in the Empire State Building.
The architects were Harrison & Abramowitz, who also gave us the noticeably similar Westinghouse Building (now called 11 Stanwix) and the Alcoa Building (Regional Enterprise Tower for a while, but seems to be called something else now).
It’s likely that real architects look down on the firm of HKS, Inc., as a bunch of hacks who specialize in expensive projects for people with unenlightened taste. Unenlightened? Well, that’s old Pa Pitt in a nutshell! The Encore on 7th, externally, is very much to his taste. Since the architectural firm is known for monster projects like 311 South Wacker, the tallest building in the world whose name is its street address, this one was probably assigned to an unpaid intern. But it is a fine addition to the skyline: modern without losing the context of its location, and suitable for its location without losing its distinctiveness. The apartments inside are very expensive, but they have swell views.
Mount Washington is the favorite skyline viewing post, but the views from across the Allegheny are impressive in their own way. These pictures were taken just as the sun was setting.
This is an early work of Tasso Katselas, whose public buildings litter our landscape. Every generation seems to produce a favorite court architect, the darling of the Allegheny County nobility, and Tasso Katselas was that architect until his retirement about ten years ago.
This particular building, built in 1966 as Allegheny Towers, is on many short lists of the ugliest buildings downtown, and Father Pitt tends to agree with that assessment. It is a parking garage halfway up; then, on top of that, there is a stack of miscellaneous apartments that look as though someone piled them there temporarily, intending to slide them into a finished building later. There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation; the windows are random noise. Compare it to the one arm of the cool and elegant Two Gateway Center behind it and to the left, or the textured glass wall of PPG Place behind that, and its lack of harmony will be immediately apparent.
But Father Pitt would not have you dismiss Tasso Katselas on the basis of this one building, which is probably very comfortable for the residents. He has given us buildings Father Pitt loathes with a passion, and buildings Father Pitt loves with an immeasurable love. His Pittsburgh International Airport terminal is peerless: the best airport terminal Father Pitt has ever seen. It minimizes the distances between the farthest gates; it controls security easily (and remember that it was built at a time when security was not nearly so much of an obsession as it is now); and it is the only airport terminal Father Pitt knows where every word of the pages and announcements is clearly audible. How many times have you been in another airport and found yourself thinking, “I hope Mrnmkh Pthhrmrmpt recognizes his name, because I certainly don’t”? That never happens at Pitt, and it took some serious architectural thinking to make those acoustics happen.
And that is the thing that probably made Tasso Katselas’ career: his buildings may be beautiful or ugly, but they are almost always practical. They work very well for their intended purposes, because the architect has clearly taken accommodating those intended purposes as his first duty, rather than as a luxury that one might be able to afford after one has indulged one’s pet design obsessions.
We have had some very artistic clouds today. This is the view from Spring Hill.
