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Burnham vs. Richardson

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.

April 2, 2009
Keenan Building

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.

April 2, 2009
St. Richard Caliguiri

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.

April 1, 2009
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.

April 1, 2009
City-County Building

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.

March 31, 2009
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.

March 30, 2009
Spring Flower Show at Phipps

It must be spring, because Phipps Conservatory is full of daffodils, tulips, grape hyacinths, and tourists.

March 30, 2009
Yarn Graffiti

Hye Jin Lee, a student at Carnegie Mellon, has woven colorful patterns into the fence along the Junction Hollow Bridge in Oakland.

March 24, 2009
Carnegie-Mellon Through the Steam

Steam from the Carnegie heating plant in Junction Hollow below veils Hamerschlag Hall and Roberts Hall at Carnegie-Mellon.

March 22, 2009
Hygeia

In honor of the physicians who served in the First World War, Hygeia, goddess of health and proper sanitation, raises her torch in Schenley Park. Phipps Conservatory is in the background.

March 8, 2009