Tag: Fifth Avenue

  • The Great Soho Curve; or, Why We Don’t Have Cable Cars Anymore

    The Great Soho Curve
    From “Flem’s” Views of Old Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: George T. Fleming, 1905), p. 43

    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 It has long since been replaced by more mundane buildings at Carlow University, but this picture shows the impression it must have made as you rode the cable car out from downtown toward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.


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  • A Late Holiday Feature: Negley-Gwinner-Harter House, Shadyside

    Negley-Gwinner-Harter House

    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.

    Negley-Gwinner-Harter House
    Negley-Gwinner-Harter House
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

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  • Building the Tower at PNC Plaza

    Early construction on the Tower at PNC Plaza

    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.

    Before topping out

    June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.

    In August, 2014

    August 29, 2014.

    In early March, 2015

    March 2, 2015.

    Mid-March

    March 10, 2015, with bonus bus coming toward you.

    On St. Patrick’s Day, 2015

    March 17, 2015.

    June 13

    June 13, 2015.

    September 10, 2015

    September 10, 2015, just a few weeks before opening.

    November 12, 2020

    The completed tower on November 12, 2020.


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  • May Building

    May Building

    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.

    Wreath on the cornice

    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.

    Cartouche on the May Building
    May Building and addition

    The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.

  • Hillman House, Shadyside

    Hillman House

    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.

    Hillman House plaque on gatepost
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Hillman House
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • Moreland-Hoffstot House, Shadyside

    Putti on the porch roof of the Moreland-Hoffstot House

    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.

    Moreland-Hoffstot House
    Moreland-Hoffstot House
    Porch
    Porch roof with putti
    Urn
    West side of the house
    Moreland-Hoffstot House
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
  • One PNC Plaza

    One PNC Plaza

    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.

    Base of One PNC Plaza
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    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.
  • The Fairfax, Oakland

    Entrance to the Fairfax

    Designed by Washington (D. C.) architect Philip Morison Jullien, the Fairfax was one of the grandest apartment houses in Pittsburgh when it opened in 1927. It certainly isn’t our biggest apartment building now, but it still makes a strong impression as you walk past on Fifth Avenue.

    The Fairfax
    Arms over the entrance
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film.

    More pictures of the Fairfax.

  • Reflected Light on the Buhl Building

    Buhl Building
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

    The Buhl Building, an early work of Benno Janssen, bathed in reflected light. Perhaps the image would be more poetic without the construction zone at the end of Fifth Avenue, but old Pa Pitt can only do so much about construction zones.

  • Park Building

    Smithfield Street face of the Park Building

    The sun was glaring and the shadows were deep, but as far as old Pa Pitt knows, these composite photographs are the only complete elevations of the Park Building on the Internet. Above, the Smithfield Street face; below, the Fifth Avenue face.

    Fifth Avenue face

    And, of course, the most striking feature of the building: the telamones that hold up the roof.

    Two telamones

    The Park Building, built in 1896, is Pittsburgh’s oldest extant skyscraper. (The Carnegie Building, demolished in 1952, was a year earlier.) George B. Post of New York was the architect, and he designed it in the florid Beaux Arts style that would also be usual in the earliest New York skyscrapers. Although it was damaged decades ago by an ill-conceived modernization, the basic outlines and much of the ornament are intact. It displays all the attributes of an early New York skyscraper—the attributes that became dogma for early skyscrapers across the country. (See “The Convention in Sky-Scrapers.”) And with good reason: a bunch of these skyscrapers may create a certain monotony in the skyline, but following the Beaux Arts skyscraper formula reliably produces a good-looking building.

    “Form follows function,” as Louis Sullivan said. Modernist architects used that saying as a slogan (which probably annoyed Mr. Sullivan) meaning that the form of a building should express the structural functions of the parts. But the form of a Beaux Arts skyscraper expresses the social functions of its parts: it makes visible what different parts of the building do, in a way that modernist architecture often fails to accomplish.

    The basic formula for early skyscrapers is base, shaft, and cap. “A convention of treating them as columns with a decorated capital, a long plain central shaft, and a heavier base, was early adopted,” as the Architectural Record said in 1903.

    The base—usually the first two floors—is the public part of the building, where retail shops or banking halls and such things are located—where, in short, the public interacts with the main business of the building.

    The shaft, which is usually a repeating pattern of windows and wall, is where the ordinary business offices of the skyscraper are located.

    Up in the stratospheric heights of the cap are the very most important people—the princes of commerce, and the lackeys and flunkeys who attend to their needs.

    Now look at the Park Building, and you will see that the third floor, though more or less part of the shaft, is outlined and set apart from the rest. This is the bosses’ floor, in which the important men who supervise what goes on downstairs are located.

    Just by looking at the face of the building, you can tell what goes on in each of its parts, which is not true of a modernist glass box. Here the social functions of each floor are made visible in stone and brick. Although the form is not structural, in a human sense this is form following function.