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).
Two carved Romanesque faces on the Fourth Avenue side of the Times Building.
In the distance, the Tower at PNC Plaza looms over the next block.
If you love architecture, Fourth Avenue gives you a more varied aesthetic experience per block than any other street in the city. Here we have the Richardsonian Romanesque style as it applies to a proto-skyscraper: the Fidelity Building, designed by James T. Steen. It opened in 1889, when Richardson’s courthouse on Grant Street was brand new. Its seven floors are close to the limit for pre-steel-cage architecture. Only a year after this building opened, construction began on the Conestoga Building on Smithfield Street, the first steel-cage building in Pittsburgh.
The photograph is huge, by the way: at full size it’s 8.88 megabytes, so don’t click on it on a metered connection. Once again, old Pa Pitt has put it together from multiple photographs, which was the only way to get the whole front of the building from across the street.
A 1960 skyscraper by the prolific Harrison & Abramovitz (who also gave us the U. S. Steel Tower, the Westinghouse Building, and the Alcoa Building). Father Pitt thinks it looks better as an architect’s rendering than in person. He has therefore made his photograph (merged from three separate photographs) look as much like an architect’s rendering as possible.
A grey day, and the U. S. Steel Tower has its head in the clouds, as it often has. Below we see the frozen back channel of the Allegheny at Herr’s Island (or Washington’s Landing).
