Our second-tallest building, this octagonal tower was planned to be the headquarters of Dravo Steel, but was sold to Mellon Bank while still under construction; thus its original name “One Mellon Center.” When the mad boom of the 1980s ended, plans for smaller matching buildings next to it were gradually abandoned.
The Arrott Building, designed by Frederick Osterling, is the most ornate of the famous Fourth Avenue towers. (The interior is as impressive as the exterior.) This view of the back is possible because of the temporary vacancy of a lot on Forbes Avenue, where a new skyscraper is going up. Behind and to the left, we see the People’s Savings Bank tower by Alden & Harlow with its curious rusticated stone in the kind of random patterns cartoonists use to suggest a brick wall without actually having to draw all those bricks.
Two of the three original Gateway Center towers, designed by Eggers & Higgins as a model for urban redevelopment after the Second World War. (In the picture above, the entrance to the Gateway subway station is in front.) They were meant to be clad with ordinary brick, and they would have been ugly excrescences; but for various reasons they ended up with these gleaming chrome walls instead, creating a constantly shifting play of light all day. “Towers in a park” was the International Style ideal of a city; it was usually a miserable failure when actually built, but many of the miserable failures were inspired by this conspicuous success, which was one of the most talked-about building projects of the postwar era.
The back of Daniel Burnham’s Oliver Building gleams in the late-afternoon November sun. For some time after it was built, this was the tallest building in Pittsburgh, and—to put the American skyscraper craze in perspective—taller than any building in the entire worldwide British Empire.
It would be hard to explain Light-Up Night to an out-of-towner. The abstract idea of a night when Christmas lights are turned on for the season is not hard to convey, but no words could describe the seething mass of cheerful humanity that gathers downtown, stuffing trolleys like rolling sardine cans and tying up traffic for hours. It is a night when every good Pittsburgher feels obliged to pay his respects to the Golden Triangle. There are bands, orchestras, choirs, street performers, multiple fireworks displays, lights, ice skating, and even a few random acts of kindness. Every year it’s a bigger deal than last year.
The Horne’s Christmas tree, above, is a tradition that predates Light-Up Night by decades. The Horne’s department store is gone, but the owners of the building still graciously allow us to admire the famous tree that takes up a whole corner of what used to be our second-largest department store.
Another view of the Gulf and Koppers Towers, this time from the Lower Hill. Surprisingly, the Koppers Tower (left) is one of only two classic skyscrapers in Pittsburgh with setbacks, the other being the Grant Building, which was under construction at the same time.
Two grand Art Deco skyscrapers face each other across Seventh Avenue: the Gulf Tower (1932) and the Koppers Tower (1929).
The Gulf Tower (in front in these pictures) is a good example of the style Father Pitt calls “Mausoleum-on-a-Stick”: the top is modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. This was Pittsburgh’s tallest building for decades, until it was surpassed by the U. S. Steel Tower; after the building boom of the 1980s, it now stands at number 6. The architects, Trowbridge & Livingston, were the originators of the Mausoleum-on-a-Stick style: twenty years earlier, they had created it with the Bankers Trust Company Building in New York, which looks very much like a primitive, pre-Deco version of the Gulf Tower.
The Koppers Tower was designed by the prolific firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, whose buildings litter the skyline in Chicago, and who also designed the Terminal Tower in Cleveland. This is the most splendid Art Deco building in Pittsburgh, and it was very briefly the city’s tallest building, until the Grant Building surpassed it a few months later.
Little glimpses of the downtown skyline pop up unexpectedly in hilltop neighborhoods. Here, from a back street in Beechview, we see Mount Washington, with the U. S. Steel Tower and the BNY Mellon Center poking their heads up behind the hill.
The new Tower at PNC Plaza will be our tallest skyscraper since the boom of the 1980s, when four of our five tallest buildings went up. The new building will be our seventh-tallest when it is completed, bumping the Cathedral of Learning down to eighth-tallest. It’s supposed to be “the world’s greenest skyscraper,” and it will be full of the latest green tech. But it all starts with the same steel cage that has formed the basis of almost every tall building since the 1890s.
The Park Building, designed by George B. Post and built in 1896, is a feast of classical detailing, and probably our oldest existing skyscraper, depending on our definition of “skyscraper.” (The Conestoga Building, built in 1892, is our earliest steel-cage building, but it is only seven storeys high.)
No one knows for sure who sculpted the row of telamones that hold up the roof, but it is certainly one of Pittsburgh’s most memorable and yet most neglected sights—neglected because few pedestrians ever look up to see the figures glowering down at them.
The Park Building is at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street, a short walk from either Steel Plaza or Wood Street subway station.
