It used to be the Hilton, whose management kept flirting with bankruptcy. For some time the odd swoopy addition on the front was stalled half-finished; it is now completed and open. This is Pittsburgh’s tallest hotel, and probably the ugliest as well. But as a place to stay, it has its benefits—among them, spectacular views in all directions.
One of the more prominent of the skyscrapers from the Postmodernist boom in the 1980s. The spindle that sticks out the top has a particular meaning: it marks the height the builders had intended the building to reach. They were thwarted by the city government, which thought for some reason that it would be too tall at that height, although the monstrous U. S. Steel Building had not bothered them a decade and a half before.
Do you like this building better with or without a leafy frame? Father Pitt is willing to oblige either way.
The entrance to the Gateway station, which as a work of architecture is hard to classify. The best term Father Pitt can come up with is “whimsical.”
A train of two Siemens SD-400 cars, built in the 1980s and rebuilt a few years ago, stops at Gateway on its way to the North Side. Trolley geeks will be interested to know that St. Louis also uses SD-400s; but the St. Louis cars do not have the extra street-level doors—which old Pa Pitt calls the “Pittsburgh doors”—to cope with Pittsburgh’s odd mix of platform-level stations and street-level stops. The newer CAF cars in Pittsburgh had to make the same adaptation. One wonders whether trolley makers groan when they get a call from Pittsburgh, or whether dollar signs pop up in their eyes when they think of what they can charge for customization.
Big Heart Pet Brands is the former pet-food division of Del Monte. You know the names of many of their products from endless television commercials. This attractive, though rather pedestrian, building on the North Shore is the Eastern offices of the company, which is based in San Francisco; it’s a good example of the transformation of the North Shore in the last two decades.
Penn Avenue in the Cultural District, Pittsburgh, from the corner of Sixth Street. The view includes the O’Reilly Theater and Theater Square (architect Michael Graves) and the Penn Avenue bikeway.
A panoramic view of the Walled Garden. Mellon Park was originally the Mellons’ back yard; the Walled Garden was designed by the landscape architects Vitale and Geiffert.
The Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel is named for the vast drifts of trilliums that grow in the woods there. There are two species: the Great White Trillium, Trillium grandiflorum, and the Wake-Robin, Trillium erectum. The Great White is, as you might expect, white (though occasionally pale pink); the Wake-Robin has several color forms, of which red is the usual in most of its range, but white dominates in the Pittsburgh area.
Father Pitt’s best pictures of wildflowers always end up at Flora Pittsburghensis, which you should certainly see right now if you like spring flowers.
Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum).
White, red, pink, and yellow forms of the Wake-Robin (Trillium erectum).
Not one of our most famous or most distinguished buildings, but big: this is the thirteenth-tallest building in Pittsburgh—the twelfth-tallest downtown (leaving out the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland). It opened in 1976 as Equibank Plaza, and ended up in the hands of PNC after many mergers and acquisitions. Since PNC calls this “Two PNC Plaza,” its own current headquarters “One PNC Plaza,” the mixed-use skyscraper at the foot of Fifth Avenue “Three PNC Plaza,” and its new signature skyscraper “The Tower at PNC Plaza,” old Pa Pitt is forced to conclude that PNC thinks of the whole Golden Triangle as “PNC Plaza.”
For the first time since the 1980s, downtown Pittsburgh has two skyscrapers going up at once (the other being the Tower at PNC Plaza). The project was begun as “the Gardens at Market Square,” but became “Tower Two-Sixty” at about the time construction began. The skeleton has risen, and now the skin begins to take shape.
