The porch of the City-County Building is a massive, welcoming space. Something has to be done inside those gargantuan arches, and this is it: an abstract pattern of interlocking arcs that makes the ceiling look something like the vault of heaven, with the sun at its zenith, surrounded by cheerful cumulus clouds.
The City-County Building is two blocks south on Grant Street from the Steel Plaza subway station.
In western Pennsylvania, we call it an onion snow: the last snow of the season, late enough that you can see the tops of the onions through the snow. It’s the cue for every good Pittsburgher to say, “We’ve never had weather like this before.”
The County Office Building is a curious combination of Romanesque and late Art Deco, with more than a hint of the style Father Pitt likes to call American Fascist. Below, an eagle ornament on the corner holds the Allegheny County arms in its talons. On the arms: a ship, a plough, and three sheaves of grain (though they look like mushrooms in concrete).
The County Office Building is a short walk away from the First Avenue subway station.
Chinatown in Pittsburgh was a tiny but lively enclave of two blocks behind Grant Street between Second and Third Avenues. Today it’s mostly lawyers’ offices. The Hong Kong Express 2 is newer, inhabiting an old Chinatown building; but the Chinatown Inn, which goes right through from Second Avenue to Third Avenue, is the sole remnant from the old days. Above, the Second Avenue side of Chinatown faces the ramp to the Boulevard of the Allies viaduct; below, the Third Avenue side faces a construction site.
Chinatown is a short walk away from the First Avenue subway station.
It may be a bit perverse to call it a subway station when it’s clearly an elevated station, but this is the section of combined streetcar lines that Pittsburghers generally call the subway. Most of it is indeed underground; First Avenue is the only elevated station downtown. Above, an inbound train arrives on its way into the subway tunnel; below, an outbound train picks up passengers.
Henry Hornbostel’s last great work was his biggest, a late-art-deco skyscraper towering next to his own City-County Building. The original lobby has been replaced by a 1980s parody of an art-deco interior, but the building is otherwise much as Hornbostel imagined it in the late 1930s. On top is a big red light that blinks “P-I-T-T-S-B-U-R-G-H” in Morse code all night—a landmark that guided commercial aircraft from a hundred miles away in the early days of aviation.
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. 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.
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.
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