Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

Federal Building

In 1931 Andrew W. Mellon had been Secretary of the Treasury for ten years. He was one of the most powerful men in the world; they used to say that three presidents had served under him. This building was his gift to his native city, a reminder of his almost imperial power, and a perfect example of the architectural style Father Pitt likes to call American Fascist.

The word “fascist” comes from fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority. The fasces are a bundle of twigs with an axe in the middle. And here they are, right over the entrance, making this perhaps the only literally fascist building in Pittsburgh. [Update: This is far from true; once he started to look for them, old Pa Pitt found that fasces were quite common on government buildings before the Second World War.]

The Federal Building is a block and a half north on Grant Street from the Steel Plaza subway station.

May 10, 2009
Duquesne Club

The Allegheny Club has its influence, and the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club is awash in old money. But the Duquesne Club is where the power is. This is the club that runs Pittsburgh, and from here much of the rest of the world. It’s the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission all rolled together in one tastefully decorated brownstone building. Here we see it from Trinity Churchyard across Sixth Avenue.

And now old Pa Pitt will regale you with a Duquesne Club story he heard many years ago from an artist who made her living painting portraits of the excessively rich.

One of this portraitist’s clients had invited her to the Duquesne Club for lunch, and while she was waiting to meet him, she noticed an impressive collection of paintings on the walls by that great humorist in oils, David Gilmour Blythe. She approached one of the impeccably outfitted guards to ask whether the club ever lent any of the paintings to the museum.

The guard drew himself up to his full dignity. “Madam,” he said in carefully measured tones, “we are the museum.”

The Duquesne Club is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.

May 9, 2009
Fountain on Mellon Green

In the 1980s boom, Mellon Bank intended to build a whole clot of skyscrapers around One Mellon Center on Grant Street. This open lot was reserved for that expansion, but it never happened. Having given up on those grandiose plans, the current owners have turned it into a pleasant urban oasis with a fountain in the middle.

The Ross Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station is right at the corner of Mellon Green.

May 8, 2009
Forgotten Pittsburgh

Walk back Montour Way to where it intersects with Strawberry Way, and you’ll drop through a hole in time back to the Pittsburgh of two hundred years ago. These little houses, improbably nestled among the skyscrapers, have somehow survived everything that has happened to downtown Pittsburgh since the birth of the skyscraper in the late 1800s. Even more improbably, one of them now holds a clothing store so exclusive that it can face a forgotten alley and nobody has to know about it.

In the background of the last picture, you can see the looming shrouded bulk of Henry Hornbostel’s Smithfield United Church, which is currently undergoing restoration.

This forgotten corner of old Pittsburgh is just a short walk from either the Wood Street subway station or the Ross Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station.

May 8, 2009
Granite Building

The Granite Building is a riotous celebration of every style of Romanesque ornament. The architect seems to have been less concerned with a harmonious whole than with just having oodles of fun in stone.

The Granite Building is right across Wood Street from the Wood Street subway station.

May 7, 2009
Westinghouse Building

Back in the days when Westinghouse was a giant international conglomerate, this was its world headquarters. It was designed by Harrison and Abramovitz, the same architects responsible for the similarly black and steely U. S. Steel building. Here we see it from the immaculately tended landscape of Equitable Plaza.

Old Pa Pitt can’t help thinking that the Westinghouse building looks like two Mies Van der Rohe buildings stacked one on top of the other.

The Westinghouse Building is at the other end of Equitable Plaza from the Gateway Center subway station.

May 7, 2009
Towers in a Park

Towers in a park: the modernist architectural ideal. It almost never worked the way it was supposed to, but the massive effort poured into Gateway Center in Pittsburgh’s first “Renaissance” created a towers-in-a-park development that has actually kept its attractive shine for half a century.

The distinctive chrome coating of the three identical cruciform towers was an afterthought. According to Mr. Franklin Toker, they were designed for brick facing, but stainless steel was substituted at the last minute. Then, because the Korean war made stainless steel scarce, chrome-alloyed steel was what the builders could actually get.

Brick would have been a modernist eyesore; the gleaming chrome creates a constantly shifting landscape of light throughout the day. The other secret of the success of this development is in the landscaping: no expense was spared to make it both pleasant and useful, so that people would want to spend time outside among the towers.

It would be hard to overestimate how pernicious the effect of this beautiful and pleasant complex of towers was on the rest of the city. It was the talk of the architectural world when it went up; everyone pointed to Pittsburgh, where an ugly warehouse district had been replaced by the modernist ideal, as the future of urban planning.

People learn the wrong lessons from success. In this case, the lesson urban planners took from Gateway Center was not that attention to detail matters, and that it is vitally important to create a pleasant environment that people will love; no, the lesson they took from it was that old buildings should be replaced by blocks of towers. Ugly brick slabs went up all over the East End to warehouse the poor. Many of them have since been blown to bits by more enlightened urban planners in favor of real houses that real people like to live in, but the incalculable damage they did to their neighborhoods is only now being reversed.

Gateway Center is just across the street from the Gateway Center subway station.

May 6, 2009
God and Mammon

The spire of Trinity Cathedral is dwarfed by the massive Oliver Building behind it, one of Daniel Burnham’s greatest gifts to Pittsburgh.

Trinity Cathedral is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.

May 6, 2009
Ornaments on Heinz Hall

These ornaments in relief adorn the exterior of Heinz Hall, formerly the Loew’s Penn movie palace, and now home to the Pittsburgh Symphony. The creation of this first-rate concert hall began the long transformation of the decaying theater district into the bustling and lively cultural attraction it is today.

Heinz Hall is a short walk around the corner from the Wood Street subway station.

May 5, 2009
Building the Subway

A big hole in Stanwix Street marks where the new Gateway Center subway station is under construction below. When the new subway line to the North Side opens, this larger station will replace the old Gateway Center subway station, with its squealing underground loop and single platform.

May 5, 2009