The old Westinghouse Building, designed by Harrison and Abramovitz, specialists in black steel hulks. Here we see it from the Monongahela side.
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Westinghouse Building
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Barge Train on the Mon
Click on the picture to enlarge it. The Monongahela is still very much a working river, and barge trains like this are a common sight. This one is empty and going upstream. Somewhere up there these barges will be filled with coal and come back downstream with their loads.
The boat that pushes the barges from behind is called, defying common sense, a towboat (corrected from “tug,” thanks to the helpful comment of a kind reader). Working on the barge trains is a dangerous business, but river culture has its own romance, with strong traditions passed on through the generations that most of us who spend our days on dry land know nothing about.
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Letterbox in the Frick Building
A brass letterbox in the lobby of the Frick Building downtown. Letters come down the shaft from the upper floors and into this miniature postal temple, where they are treated royally for a few hours until they have to be transferred to a humble mailbag.
UPDATE: Note the clarification from the kind commenter below, who points out that the shaft is no longer in use. What would H. C. Frick say if you told him he had to walk all the way down to the lobby to deposit his outgoing mail? (It’s a trick question: H. C. Frick would of course reply, “No, you have to walk all the way down to the lobby to deposit my outgoing mail.”)
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Federal Deco
The Federal Reserve Bank on Grant Street is actually one of our purest Art Deco buildings. It’s a Moderne interpretation of the style old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist.
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Fort Pitt Blockhouse
Old Colonel Bouquet was proud enough of his little blockhouse that he carved his name in the stone above the door. Or rather he had one of his minions do it, because officers don’t have to do things like that for themselves.
The rafters in the roof are almost all original. When the fort became superfluous in the late 1700s, the little building was sold off and ended up a private dwelling.
Eventually the Daughters of the American Revolution bought the place and stripped away the later accretions. Now the blockhouse looks much as it did when Col. Bouquet was in charge.
Bouquet, by the way, may have been proud enough to put his name on the blockhouse; but finding that he had the honor of naming the fort and the little trading town that instantly appeared beside it, he chose to name them both after William Pitt, prime minister at the time, who was largely credited with the British victories against France all over the world.
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Benedum-Trees Building
The top of the Benedum-Trees Building, one of the famous bank towers that made Fourth Avenue one of the wonders of the world at the very beginning of the age of skyscrapers. The Fourth Avenue historic district is a few blocks’ walk from the Steel Plaza subway station.
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Under Construction
Not since “Renaissance II” in the 1980s has so much construction been going on downtown. Now, as then, a subway line is a big part of it, but new landmark buildings have also gone up, and the Diamond, as we see here, is being completely redesigned. (Planning maps call it “Market Square,” but the best way to explain it to suburbanites and visitors is to say that it’s spelled “Market Square” and pronounced “Diamond.”) While the rest of the country was plunged deep into recession, Pittsburgh was having its biggest building boom in a quarter century.
Update: The Diamond is now finished and reopened.
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Reflections
The Clark Building and the Keenan Building, two Liberty Avenue landmarks, reflected in an ugly building across the street.
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Sidewalk of Liberty Avenue
Twenty years ago, Liberty Avenue was still a street parents warned their children about, the seedy heart of the seediest part of downtown. Now it’s one of our signature boulevards, with a parade of old and new architecture that makes it one of America’s great cityscapes. Much of that revitalization can be credited to the conscious effort of a few urban dreamers who dared to imagine a great future for an area most Pittsburghers preferred to ignore.
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One Mellon Center
The octagonal tower of One Mellon Center, Pittsburgh’s second-tallest building, seen from the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Grant Street. In the foreground at left is the dramatic base of the U. S. Steel Tower, whose colossal bulk is supported on impossibly spindly piers, defying gravity like something from the imagination of Rene Magritte. (From a distance, the building strikes old Pa Pitt as pedestrian, but the lobby and mezzanine are dramatic.) At right is the base of the Koppers Building.