Having walled off the Carnegie Building on the east side, Henry Frick commissioned Daniel Burnham once more to build a wall on the south side. Once again, Burnham responded with an elegant design: not quite the masterpiece that the Frick Building was, but beautiful and perfectly proportioned, as you’d expect from Burnham. Here we see it from the porch of the City-County Building, with the statue of Richard Caliguiri in the foreground.
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 fantastical Arabian Nights dome on top of this building was Col. Keenan’s own penthouse [incorrect; see below]. It was rumored to be a love nest he shared with his mistress; Mr. Franklin Toker relates that a whole generation of Pittsburgh ladies learned to cross the street rather than walk on the sidewalk in front of that den of iniquity. In front of it is the low triangular building that began as the Monongahela National Bank, but now houses the Wood Street subway station below and an art gallery above.
Correction: The information from Franklin Toker was incorrect, though it was understandable that he did not question it. Pittsburgh legend still insists that the dome was Col. Keenan’s penthouse, but in fact it was rented out for more prosaic purposes: a photography studio and a secretarial school, among others. See this article by Mark Houser in Pittsburgh Magazine.
For ten years from 1978 to 1988, Richard Caliguiri (pronounced, in defiance of all orthography, “Cal-i-JOOR-ee”) was mayor of Pittsburgh. During that time, even though the steel industry collapsed and hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished, downtown Pittsburgh went through the most prosperous period in its history. In 1988, he died of Pennsylvania Politician’s Disease, otherwise known as amyloidosis, just before the prosperity ended, assuring his canonization as the most beloved mayor in the city’s history. This statue by the famous portraitist Robert Berks stands on the steps of the City-County Building. He’s looking over a map of his beloved Golden Triangle, a map that changed considerably during his time in office.
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.
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.
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.
Seen from Mount Washington, the graceful Pauli truss of the the Smithfield Street Bridge leaps over the Monongahela.
Slices of the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh, with every kind of stone, brick, steel, and glass glimmering in the noonday sun.
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.
