Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Fourth Avenue

    Fourth Avenue

    A very early “concrete canyon,” Fourth Avenue was one of the wonders of the world a century ago. At that time it was second only to Wall Street as a banking center. This view, from the skywalk between Oxford Centre and Macy’s, gives us some idea of what it looked like back then: an absurdly narrow street flanked by absurdly tall buildings. The Fourth Avenue bank towers are dwarfed now by the modern skyscrapers in the Golden Triangle, but the narrowness of the street still accents their height and makes the canyon seem even deeper.

  • City-County Building

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    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.

  • Lion on the Allegheny County Courthouse

    A perfectly Romanesque lion guards the entrance to the Allegheny County Courthouse. When H. H. Richardson designed the building, the lion was meant to be nearer street level; but shaving one storey’s worth of height off Grant Street left it high on the front wall.

  • The Smithfield Street Bridge

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    Seen from Mount Washington, the graceful Pauli truss of the the Smithfield Street Bridge leaps over the Monongahela.

  • Textures in the Skyline

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    Slices of the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh, with every kind of stone, brick, steel, and glass glimmering in the noonday sun.

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    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

  • “Chapel” on the Union Trust Building

    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.

  • Allegheny County Courthouse

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    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.

  • The Kaufmann’s Clock

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    The store is called Macy’s now, but you’ll hardly find a real Yinzer who can bring himself to call it that. It will always be Kaufmann’s, the biggest department store in Pittsburgh, taking up a whole city block and slopping over into the next. With a dozen floors of retail space, it’s still bigger than some whole suburban shopping malls.

    This clock, at the corner of Fifth and Smithfield, is Pittsburgh’s legendary meeting place. It can still get crowded underneath with people who’ve promised to wait for someone “under the Kaufmann’s clock.” And it’s always working, which is a boon for people who, like old Pa Pitt, often forget to stuff their watches into their pockets in the morning.

    Macy’s is a short stroll from the Grant Street exit of the Steel Plaza subway station.

  • In the Subway

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    The streetcar lines from the South Hills all converge downtown and go into a clean and pleasant subway. Steel Plaza station, shown here, is where the short line to Penn Station (served only in rush hour) branches off the main line. Here a not-in-service car from Penn Station sits at the platform waiting for its next assignment.

  • Gateway to the Smithfield Street Bridge

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    [Updated, with many thanks to “Mercator” for a helpful comment.] The 1915 gateway of the 1883 Smithfield Street Bridge, as seen through the snow of a January afternoon. The Pauli or lenticular truss is unusual; in Pittsburgh, with its more than 500 bridges, this is the only one. The oldest steel bridge in the United States, this was designed by Gustav Lindenthal, who knew a thing or two about bridges. The original span was half the width; for the better part of the twentieth century, the bridge carried automobiles on the downstream side and streetcars on the upstream side. In the 1990s (after the streetcars had been rerouted into the subway by way of the Panhandle Bridge), the bridge was refurbished and painted in bright Victorian colors to replace the utilitarian gray that had coated it for decades. This is our most popular bridge for pedestrians; it connects downtown with the shops and restaurants at Station Square.

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.