Henry W. Oliver wanted to leave a mark on Pittsburgh, and he certainly did. Virgin Alley was renamed Oliver Avenue, and he planned this building to be the tallest in Pittsburgh. It was the tallest when it opened in 1910, although Oliver himself didn’t live to see it finished. As architect, he hired Daniel Burnham, the great Chicago beaux-arts master for whom Pittsburgh was practically a second home—there are more Burnham buildings here than anywhere else but Chicago.
The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust lives in this gorgeously restored building with a wonderfully checkered history. It has been, among other things, a hotel and an adult bookstore, where (presumably) all the books were over 21 years old.
Both these buildings are quite utilitarian, with ground-floor storefronts and upper-floor workshops; but each is adorned with its own distinctive classical detailing. The Greek-key pattern shows up on both, but no. 819 in particular adds a profusion of other ornaments that distinguish it from its neighbors.
Once again, the narrowness of Penn Avenue makes it difficult to get a complete picture of the façades of these buildings, so the tops are a little blurry.
These two buildings, like many in the Cultural District, are going residential. Though the styles are radically different—the McNally Building light and classical, the Bonn Building heavy and Romanesque—they are only three years apart: the McNally building was put up in 1896, the Bonn Building in 1893.
Penn Avenue is a very narrow street, and getting a picture of the whole front of a nine-story building involves a lot of fiddling, most of it done by the Hugin stitching program automatically. Thus the picture is a bit fuzzy toward the top.
The Hoffstot Building (left) and its neighbor at 813 Liberty Avenue both have the large windows that indicate workshops of some sort on the upper floors. No. 813 has grown some curious postmodern excrescences at the top and an industrial-looking awning at ground level. It also preserves the left edge of a demolished building, now replaced by a one-story shop, that must have been interestingly ornamental.
The Renshaw Building (left) was built in 1908; it is architecturally interesting for the way it duplicates the base-shaft-cap form of a standard beaux-arts skyscraper in miniature.
The Kirkpatrick Building was built a quarter-century earlier in 1884. A cast-iron front on the first four floors gives way to standard Victorian Romanesque brickwork in the upper half.
The Maginn Building was one of several Romanesque designs by the prolific Charles Bickel. The large windows of the upper floors indicate that it was built as some kind of workshop or small factory, of which there were many in this section of town.
William G. Johnston & Co. was a very successful printing and bookbinding firm that put up this building on Ninth Street at Penn Avenue in 1886. Mr. Johnston would probably be pleased to see that his building looks very much as it did when he knew it, except that—like every other building downtown—it is doubtless cleaner. If you look very closely, you may see a small stitching error, which comes from the fact that this picture is put together from multiple photographs. The lesson, obviously, is not to look so closely.
Addendum: Through various permutations, the William G. Johnston Company was the successor of Zadok Cramer, one of the very early printers and booksellers in Pittsburgh, who began his business here in 1800.
The Skinny Building is restored to its original five-foot-deep glory. Actually, that’s five feet two inches: the Skinny Building, on Forbes Avenue at the corner of Wood Street, is 80 feet long, 3 stories tall, and 5 feet 2 inches deep. Is it the skinniest building in the world? That depends on how you measure. A building in Vancouver’s Chinatown is listed by recordkeepers as the shallowest in the world, but although its ground floor is four feet eleven inches deep, oriels make the upper floor much deeper.
An interesting fact about this building is that people literally don’t see it, even with its splendid new Victorian color scheme. Try it sometime: stand with an out-of-town visitor at the southeast corner of Forbes and Wood, and ask the visitor to describe the building on the opposite corner. Your visitor will almost certainly give you a description of the Roberts Building; it’s as though the human brain does not have a category for buildings only five feet two inches wide.
For comparison, here’s how the Skinny Building looked in 2013, before the restoration:
The Tower at PNC Plaza under construction in March of 2015. In front of it, three of the Fourth Avenue towers: the Benedum-Trees Building (1905, architect Thomas H. Scott), the Investment Building (1927, architect John M. Donn), and the Arrott Building (1902, architect Frederick Osterling).
