In the little corner of downtown Pittsburgh near First Avenue there are still some half-blocks that never entered the skyscraper age. Here we can see some of the humbler pre-skyscraper commercial architecture of Pittsburgh. The first floor of the front of this building has been heavily altered, probably by someone who wanted to make it look more Victorian and ended up making it look more 1978. But the rest of the building is a typical small Italianate structure of the 1870s.
Looking up at Henry Hornbostel’s tallest work, an Art Deco skyscraper that sits right next to the same architect’s Beaux Arts City-County Building.
We seldom look up as we pass the station on the Smithfield Street Bridge, but at the top of the building, directly over the main entrance, is this lively locomotive relief.
This is the First Avenue side of a building that occupies a whole block—or arguably more, since the little alley Gasoline Street runs right through the middle of it. Built as a utilitarian warehouse, it was repurposed as a dormitory for the Art Institute; and when that school was in its final death spiral, the building was refurbished again as—of course—luxury lofts, under the name Terminal 21.
This cover design “from a beautiful, dignified and readable booklet designed by Arthur C. Gruver, Pittsburgh,” was picked out by a printing trade journal as an outstanding example of design in 1919. It appears to show the original ground-floor front of the Romanesque Liberty Building on Penn Avenue.
A 4300-series CAF trolley leaves First Avenue on its way into the old railroad tunnel that leads to Steel Plaza. Pittsburghers count First Avenue as part of the “subway” section of the system (which in Pittsburgh terminology includes the stations from Station Square to Allegheny), but it is an elevated station; not until further in does the line actually go underground.
This was a very tall building when it opened in 1892. It’s certainly stretching a point to call this a skyscraper, yet it is in some ways the seed of all subsequent skyscrapers in Pittsburgh. This was the first building in Pittsburgh, and one of the first in the world, built with steel-cage construction, which makes practically indefinite height possible. Below we see the Conestoga Building with a couple of its great-grandchildren behind it: One PPG Place and Fifth Avenue Place.
Built for the Hartley-Rose Belting Company (so old Pa Pitt has no idea why the name on the awning lacks a hyphen, but he has no control over that), this is in effect a miniature Beaux-Arts skyscraper, with the regulation base–shaft–cap design. The architect was Edward Stotz, many of whose most famous commissions were schools—notably Schenley High School and Fifth Avenue High School.
Yes, since you ask, Father Pitt did plant tulips right in front of this patch of daylilies so he could take these pictures proving that these daylilies do really bloom as early as the end of tulip season. The pictures were taken on May 13, and old Pa Pitt does not know of any other daylilies blooming that early in the city. The variety has no name, since it came from a batch of mixed unnamed hybrid seedlings.
