The main tower of PPG Place, Philip Johnson’s masterpiece that has become the iconic symbol of downtown Pittsburgh.
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Looking Up at PPG Place
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Christmas Leftovers at PPG Place
The coldest weather of the year couldn’t keep a few intrepid skaters off the rink at PPG Place. The Christmas tree is still up, hiding the obelisk that Peter Leo likes to call the Tomb of the Unknown Bowler.
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Fourth Avenue
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The Puddler
Made entirely of glass, this art-deco mural, or sculpture, shows a “puddler,” a man who stirs the molten iron ore until it’s tasty enough to make good steel. The location should be obvious from the photograph, but note that the Puddler himself is around the corner over the Wood Street entrance.
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The Horne’s Christmas Tree
Every year, the old Joseph Horne department store turned one corner of the biulding into a Christmas tree. The department store is gone, but the new owners have kept up the Christmas-tree tradition.
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CNG Tower
The top of the CNG Tower on Liberty Avenue, which opened in 1987. One of the “postmodern” masterpieces of the 1980s boom, this is now called the Dominion Tower. Architecturally, it is a notable revival of the base-shaft-cap formula of the earliest skyscrapers.
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View from the Rotunda
An impressionistic view from the rotunda of Daniel Burnham’s Pennsylvania Railroad Station, now offices and condo apartments under the name “The Pennsylvanian.” Amtrak trains still arrive at a smaller modern station grafted on to the main building.
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The Smithfield Street Bridge
Two pictures of the Smithfield Street Bridge, both taken with the same toy digital camera.
Lenticular or “scissors” trusses (sometimes called “Pauli trusses”) are rare on bridges anywhere. This is one of the great examples in the United States. The bridge was designed by one of the great names in bridge-building, Gustav Lindenthal. Until the 1980s, the dowstream side carried automobiles and the upstream side streetcars, but the streetcars were rerouted over the Panhandle Bridge when the subway downtown opened. After a major restoration, the bridge now caries automotive traffic on both sides.
If you are a bridge lover, Pittsburgh is the one city you must see before you die. There are more bridges here than in any other city anywhere, and for a considerable time there was actually a government body here charged with seeing that new bridges were not only practical and safe, but aesthetically beautiful as well. An excellent introduction to the bridges of Pittsburgh is at pghbridges.com.
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Pittsburg
For a few years around the turn of the twentieth century, Pittsburgh was most commonly spelled without the H, on account of a ruling by the Post Office that all burgs should be so spelled. The spelling had never been completely standardized, but the spelling with the H was always the popular favorite, and the Post Office soon relented. Some pedants still insisted on the other spelling, however, and the Pittsburg Press daily was so spelled into the 1930s. Here the name appears as one of the four corners of the earth under the rotunda of the Pennsylvania Station.
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The William Penn Hotel
Henry Clay Frick specified that the William Penn should be the best hotel in America, so the best hotel was what he got. The building itself is notable for its restrained elegance; inside, it was the first hotel in the United States with a private bath in every room. At first glance it seems almost severely plain, but step back a block or so and the harmony of the proportions becomes more obvious. The ornament, too, is neither lavish nor gaudy, but simply in the very best taste. Nearly a century after it was built, the William Penn remains Pittsburgh’s most famous and most elegant hotel.
