Also known as the Mellon–U. S. Steel Building (it was the headquarters of U. S. Steel before the bigger U. S. Steel Building was put up) and now by its street address, 525 William Penn Place.
Harrison & Abramovitz, who did more than any other single firm to shape the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh, were the architects of this slab of metal and glass. It was their first project here; construction started in 1949, and the building opened in 1951. In “The Stones of Pittsburgh,” James D. Van Trump describes it with effective economy: “Large cage-slab with stainless steel sheathing. Envelope characterized by a kind of elegant monotony.”
There is a little blurring in the middle of this composite picture, which old Pa Pitt was not patient enough to try to correct when it came out of the automatic stitcher that way.
From Closing Services, First Methodist Protestant Church, Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, some engravings of the old downtown church on Fifth Avenue, built in 1832. It was a sad day, of course, when the congregation moved out in 1892, but the consolation was that they were moving into a grand new Romanesque church designed for them by Frederick Osterling (still standing today as the Korean Central Church of Pittsburgh). They were probably also taking a pile of money for their church: the Kaufmann Brothers had leased the land on which the church stood, and soon a huge addition to their department store would rise there.
The First M. P. congregation had succumbed to the forces that were changing Pittsburgh from a dense medium-sized city to an urban colossus. The “Introductory Note” to the commemorative book explains the circumstances very well.
That those who worshipped together in the old church were strongly attached to it was a matter of course, and when at the close of the last service in it, Sabbath evening, May 15, the large congregation slowly retired, many went away with heavy hearts, sorrowing most of all because they should enter their old church home no more. If it is asked why did the church dispose of its home the answer is: The inexorable logic of events so decreed.
When the church was built probably no better location could have been found. It was then almost in the centre of the city and was easily reached from every point in the town. The population was held within a comparatively small territory, but as the city grew the need for business property became more and more urgent, and consequently the people were gradually forced away from their homes in the business sections of the city and scattered into surrounding suburbs. Many of the churches located in what was Pittsburgh sixty years ago have found in these later years their membership steadily and inevitably diminishing in number, and the difficulty in recruiting their ranks has increased with almost every passing year; and the explanation of both facts is the plain one: That the people have moved away and built other churches convenient to their homes.
So the church was abandoned to the inexorable march of commerce—but the land was not. For many years thereafter, Kaufmann’s, the Big Store, stood partly on land that was owned by and paying good money to the First Methodist Protestant Church, now in the tony suburb of Shadyside.
This photograph of the Great Soho Curve, a maintenance nightmare for the cable cars that very briefly made up Pittsburgh’s transit system, was taken in 1893. It appears to have been taken from the roof of a house about where the ramp from Fifth Avenue to the Boulevard of the Allies is today. Fifth Avenue still makes this double curve, though the street is one-way inbound now, and the cable cars are gone.
This picture tells the story of why we don’t have cable cars anymore. Pittsburgh streets have curves, and curves are bad for cable cars. In this picture, the entire curve is lined with cable access points about every six feet, and the picture shows cars stopped while men are fussing with one of the cables. In San Francisco, the one city where cable-car lines are still in service, the lines are all perfectly straight, except for turns at intersections. When electric traction came along, it was obviously more suitable for Pittsburgh—except where hills were prohibitively steep, and for those places we have inclines, which are a kind of cable car permanently attached to the cable.
That fairy castle on the hill at upper left is the Ursuline Young Ladies’ Academy, designed by Joseph Stillburg. It has long since been replaced by more mundane buildings at Carlow University, but this picture shows the impression it must have made as you rode the cable car out from downtown toward Oakland.
Old Pa Pitt had meant to publish these pictures a little before Christmas, but he lost track of them. And since he doesn’t want to wait till next year, here they are now. This is the Negley-Gwinner-Harter House in Shadyside, with a crew installing its Christmas ribbon. This was the house that sat derelict for years after a disastrous fire, so it is always a cheerful sight when Father Pitt walks past and sees it in fine shape like this. But it is even more cheerful all tied up in a Christmas bow.
The Tower at PNC Plaza will be ten years old this year. It occurred to Father Pitt that he had enough pictures in his collection to make up a visual story of the construction of the building, so here they are. Above, the progress as of February 18, 2014.
June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.
Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.
The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.
The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.
The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.
Here is another architectural mystery solved by recognizing a Second Empire mansion under a radical exterior alteration. We saw such a house made into an apartment building in Highland Park; here, the transformation has been managed with much more elegance. “Pittsburgh House Histories” on Facebook explains that this was originally the home of James Rees, a builder of riverboats and steam-powered industrial engines, built in the fashionable Second Empire style with a central tower much like the one at Baywood. In 1919, the house was bought by John H. Hillman, Jr., and by that time the Second Empire style was already a mortal embarrassment. Mr. Hillman hired the architect Edward P. Mellon, who prospered through his connections to rich Mellon relatives, to remodel the house. Mellon’s taste was staidly classical, but within that taste he could manage some very attractive effects. He amputated the top of the tower and refaced the house with stone, adding Renaissance trimmings. The result was a house that looked almost new and quite up to date for 1919.
If you wanted your house to convey the message “I’m rich ppttttttthhht,” then Paul Irwin was the architect to hire. This Renaissance palace uses every trick in the architect’s vocabulary to tell the world that a millionaire lives here, and he is richer than you are. It was built in 1914 on the Fifth Avenue Millionaires’ Row, where, although it is not the biggest of the surviving mansions, it somehow manages to look like the most expensive.
Sometimes the false is truer than the true. It is not possible to get a good picture of One PNC Plaza from the ground. The only way to get in the whole building—well, almost the whole building—was to stitch together multiple pictures, which produced a hideously distorted perspective. To create a rendering that looks more like what we perceive (which is not the same as what we see) when we look at the building, old Pa Pitt resorted to complicated trickery for the picture above, making four vertical slices of the picture and adjusting each one of them separately. If you look at the ground level, you can see how everything else has been broken and distorted to make the building look more like itself.
Here is the base of the building without the radical distortions.
One PNC Plaza was designed by Welton Becket and Associates; it opened in 1972. Mr. Becket died at the beginning of 1969; but it is probable that he left drawings of this building on his drafting table, since it had been planned before 1968. The firm continued under his name long after his death; One Mellon Center, which opened in 1980, was also designed by Welton Becket and Associates.
It is a curious fact that One PNC Plaza replaced another skyscraper that was shorter by only four floors: the First National Bank Building, which was designed by Daniel Burnham and ranks at number 35 on Wikipedia’s “List of tallest voluntarily demolished buildings.” It is the tallest building destroyed in Pittsburgh so far.
The First National Bank Building, which One PNC Plaza replaced.
