The Allegheny County Courthouse was finished in 1886, its tower the tallest thing in the city. In 1902, the Frick Building went up across the street, facing down the courthouse and blocking the view of the tower from much of the Golden Triangle.

Mr. Franklin Toker (Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, p. 70) tells us that the Frick Building was part of what may be the most extravagant display of architectural pettiness ever contemplated. Henry Frick had fallen out with his old patron Andrew Carnegie, and he considered the breach irreparable. The Carnegie Building was one of the finest office buildings in the city; Frick surrounded it with taller buildings that blocked out its views, light, and air, symbolically suffocating Mr. Carnegie (who had removed to Scotland and was therefore out of reach of literal suffocation). The Carnegie Building is gone, replaced with a singularly windowless annex to Kaufmann’s (now Macy’s); Frick’s monumental wall around it remains.

That story aside, the Frick Building is an exceptionally fine piece of architecture. Daniel Burnham designed it, and its classical elegance must have pleased Frick immensely. It has the misfortune, however, of being right across the street from “the best building in America,” as Philip Johnson famously called Richardson’s courthouse. Not even Daniel Burnham could compete with Richardson’s masterpiece, and wisely he decided not to. Burnham’s Pennsylvania Station is an extravagant spectacle; this is simply a remarkably tasteful office building, in its way nearly perfect.

The City-County Building, which houses a miscellaneous collection of offices for the governments of both Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, is one of Henry Hornbostel’s greatest works. It’s a perfect use of architecture to express an idea. Your local government is a great and magnificent, indeed almost imperial, institution; but at the same time it is perfectly accessible to you, the common citizen, through the gargantuan arches that face the street. All this grandeur exists to serve you.

This wonderfully ornate protrusion on the roof of the Union Trust Building, the masterpiece of Frederick Osterling, has given rise to the urban legend that there is a secret chapel on the roof, where perhaps Henry Clay Frick himself went to repent of his many sins. The truth is more prosaic and yet more impressive as an architectural accomplishment: the chapel-like structure houses the mechanics for the elevators and other necessities that normally make ugly blisters on the roofs of large buildings.

The Union Trust Building is just across the street from the Grant Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station.

A winter morning’s sunlight, reflected from the windows of the Frick Building, paints the tower of the Allegheny County Courthouse with stripes of gold. Henry Hobson Richardson, one of America’s greatest architects, considered this his masterpiece, though he did not live to see it completed. Philip Johnson, whose PPG Place has become the iconic symbol of the Pittsburgh skyline, called the Courthouse the best building in America.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then this is an unusually well-flattered building: the city hall of Minneapolis is an acknowledged copy of it. It is not unusual for an architect to copy a famous classical or medieval building, but quite rare to copy one that was only a quarter-century old at the time. Such was Richardson’s reputation that Long and Kees, architects of the Minneapolis City Hall, were willing to pay this ultimate tribute to their master in what is widely considered their own masterpiecce.

The Courthouse is half a block south on Grant Street from the Grant Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station.