Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Light-Up Night

    Abstract Christmas tree

    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.

    Diamond decorated for Light-Up Night
    Christmas tree
    Horne’s Christmas tree

    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.

  • Gulf and Koppers Towers

    Koppers Tower and Gulf Tower

    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.

  • Gulf and Koppers Towers

    Gulf Tower and Koppers Tower
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    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.

    Bigelow Boulevard leading to downtown Pittsburgh
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    Gulf Tower and Koppers Tower
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  • The View from Beechview

    Skyline through fall foliage

    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.

  • A Skyscraper Rises

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    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.

  • Telamones on the Park Building

    Telamones on the Park Building

    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.

    Telamones on the Park Building

  • Skinny Building

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    Is this the narrowest building in the world? That depends on how you define “narrowest” and “building.” At five feet two inches deep, the Skinny Building is at least remarkably skinny. 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.

    The Skinny Building is at Forbes Avenue and Wood Street, a few blocks from the Wood Street subway station.

  • Rubber Ducky

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    It’s a giant inflatable rubber ducky. Why? There may be no good answer to that question. But, to judge by the crowds at the Point today (the duck’s last weekend in the water), it seems that a giant inflatable rubber duck was just what Pittsburgh wanted.  The Port Authority is running double streetcars and Subway Locals (which serve only from Station Square through downtown to Allegheny) to handle the traffic on the subway. Downtown is full of tourists from exotic places like Iowa who came to have their pictures taken in front of the rubber duck. Traffic jams surround the Point. Street vendors are selling bags and bags of rubber ducks. Restaurants downtown are packed. All because of a rubber ducky.

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  • Lobby of Heinz Hall

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    Heinz Hall, the former Loew’s Penn movie palace, brings a little taste of pre-revolutionary Versailles to the theater district downtown. These low-light snapshots are a bit grainy, but they convey something of the opulence of the interior.

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  • Downtown from the North Shore

    2013-08-13-Downtown-01The whole North Shore of the Allegheny opposite downtown has been turned into parkland, where you can stroll, bike, or even rent a kayak—or just sit and enjoy a spectacular urban landscape.