Father Pitt

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Smithfield Street Bridge

The current portals are not original; they were built when the upstream span was widened in 1915. The original bridge was designed by Gustav Lindenthal; the current portals were designed by Stanley L. Roush, who was responsible for many prominent transportation-related projects, including the entrances to the Liberty Tubes and Armstrong Tunnel and the terminal at the Allegheny County Airport.

The bridge is the oldest through-truss bridge in the United States, and one of very few with a Pauli or lenticular truss. The piers are even older; they were reused from the previous bridge, designed by John Roebling after the Great Fire of 1845 destroyed the old wooden covered bridge that had been put up in 1818.

March 7, 2023
Central Oakland in the Rain

Rows of houses and small apartment buildings in the shadow of the Oakland medical-intellectual district.

March 6, 2023
Crocus Time

March 5, 2023
Wood-Allies Garage

A whimsical Postmodernist design that opened in 1984; it echoes Pittsburgh landmarks without pretending to be anything other than a parking garage. Father Pitt believes the architects were Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman Associates, who also designed Liberty Center (including the Federated Tower). If anyone has better information, it will be accepted with gratitude.

March 5, 2023
G. C. Murphy Buildings

It called itself “the world’s largest variety store,” and it was probably right about that. G. C. Murphy was a big chain of five-and-dime stores based in McKeesport, but the downtown Pittsburgh store was its biggest and most exciting. It had three floors of everything, including concessions rented out to everything from produce vendors to fortune tellers. The whole establishment occupied the corner of Forbes Avenue and the Diamond and went through the block to Fifth Avenue.

The chain succumbed to corporate raiders in the 1980s, who exploited quirks of capitalist logic by driving the chain into bankruptcy and getting rich in the process. The downtown store contracted into a small part of its former empire, and then closed altogether.

For a while the buildings sat empty. Now they have been restored to beautiful condition, and the Diamond is thriving again. Old Pa Pitt wishes he could have Murphy’s back, but time like an ever-rolling stream and all that.

March 4, 2023
You Can’t Get There from Here

Except on foot. This is Louisa Street in Oakland, a typical Pittsburgh street interrupted by a stairway.

March 3, 2023
What’s Left of the Wabash Bridge

The Wabash Bridge had a lot of bad luck. It was built from 1902 to 1904; when it was almost finished, it collapsed, killing ten workers. When it opened, it served Jay Gould’s spectacularly expensive Wabash Railroad, which went bankrupt in four years. The gorgeously ornate Wabash Terminal downtown continued to serve passengers until 1931, when the last passenger train rolled out, and it became a gorgeously ornate freighthouse. In 1946, the Wabash Terminal and the aerial railyard that served it burned, leaving the Wabash Bridge entirely useless. It was torn down in 1948, with the steel melted down and reused in the Mansfield Bridge between McKeesport and Dravosburg.

But the two stone piers that supported the bridge were left, and they are still here today. Occasionally they make good platforms for flags during the Regatta or some such festival. Otherwise, they just stand there. There have occasionally been proposals to put a new bridge on them to connect the Wabash Tunnel with downtown again, most famously for the planned Skybus transit system that almost but not quite happened in the 1970s. But nothing comes of them, and probably nothing will come of them unless some very expensive reconfigurations are done at the south end of the tunnel to connect it with something more useful than Woodruff Street.

March 2, 2023

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Gateway Station

Architect Rob Pfaffman gave us just about the most whimsical subway entrance old Pa Pitt has ever seen, and he has been places and seen things. The whole station is unique, above and below the ground. There are no right angles, or at least very few. Yet from a practical point of view, nothing is confusing, and the station works very well for its intended purpose, which is to get us into a trolley quickly.

March 1, 2023
Pile of Belgian Block

Belgian block set aside at a hole-digging project in a street in Oakland. What Pittsburgh needs is more holes in streets.

February 28, 2023
Kirkpatrick Building

This pleasing Victorian Romanesque commercial building was probably pushing the limits of height for its era: it was built in 1884, just before the dawn of the skyscraper age. Skyscrapers had not yet posed the problem of how to treat floor after floor in the upward rise of a building; the solution, even in the most ornate Beaux-Arts skyscrapers, turned out to be to treat the middle floors as identical repetitions (compare the later Renshaw Building to the left). That has not been done here. There are eight floors, and each of them different in some way.

February 27, 2023