Father Pitt

Tag: Firstside

  • The Mon Wharf in the 1890s

    Mon Wharf in the 1890s
    From History and Commerce of Pittsburgh and Environs, 1894.

    The busy and chaotic Mon Wharf, where goods were loaded and unloaded and passengers came to board downstream-bound steamboats. This picture was published in 1894, and we can see the dawn of the skyscraper age just beginning to break: the Conestoga Building, finished in 1892, was the first building in Pittsburgh built on a steel frame, and one of the first in the world.

    Conestoga Building

    The view is quite different today (or in 2021, when these pictures were taken), though many of the same buildings are there. The Robert Moses plan ringed downtown Pittsburgh with expressways, as Moses had done with Manhattan, cutting off the people from the rivers. It was an understandable adaptation: if there must be expressways, the riverfronts made space for them without knocking down a lot of buildings. But it took us decades to begin to reclaim the shores with a system of parks and bicycle trails.

    Firstside in May of 2021
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  • Firstside

    Firstside
    Composite of three photographs from the Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Waterfront Building

    Waterfront Building, First Avenue side

    Built in about 1872, the Waterfront Building is one of the unique row of surviving riverside commercial buildings Pittsburghers call Firstside. It dates from the time when the Monongahela wharf was a chaotically busy place, with steamboats lined up at every available space to load and unload. Now it is separated from the river by a boulevard and an expressway. Above, the First Avenue side; below, the river side.

    Waterfront Building, river side
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Firstside

    Firstside from Mount Washington

    A large composite picture (it’s 8,911 × 2,319 pixels if you enlarge it) of the row of buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard in the Firstside Historic District. Before the boulevards isolated the city from the shore, these buildings used to face the Monongahela Wharf, a chaotically busy inland port where steamboats by the dozens loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargo.

  • House Building

    House Building

    Now known as Four Smithfield Street, this early skyscraper was designed by James T. Steen and opened in 1902.

    House Building

  • Firstside

    Firstside

    The little human-sized buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard originally faced the Monongahela Wharf, where the steamboats lined up.

    Firstside

  • Conestoga Building

    Designed by Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow, this was our first steel-cage building and thus the seed from which dozens of skyscrapers grew.

  • 151 First Side

    151 First Side

    An eighteen-storey condominium tower built in 2007. Back then, only fifteen years ago, it was the first condominium tower put up in downtown Pittsburgh in nearly forty years. It proved that such an enterprise could be profitable.

  • Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse

    Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company Warehouse

    A particularly elegant Romanesque warehouse built for the company that made bathroom plumbing fashion-conscious. Standard later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard, still a leader in toilet technology today. The building is now luxurious offices under the name “Fort Pitt Commons.” According to the boundary-increase application for the Firstside Historic district, it was built 1900–1905; the architect is unknown, which is a pity, because it was obviously someone with a real sense of rhythm in architecture. (If you backed old Pa Pitt into a corner and asked him to guess the architect, he might say Charles Bickel, whose Reymer Brothers candy factory Uptown is very similar in many details, including the treatment of the arches.) Above, the side that faces Fort Pitt Boulevard and the Mon; below, the First Avenue side.

  • Conestoga Building

    Conestoga Building

    This was a very tall building when it opened in 1892. It’s certainly stretching a point to call this a skyscraper, yet it is in some ways the seed of all subsequent skyscrapers in Pittsburgh. This was the first building in Pittsburgh, and one of the first in the world, built with steel-cage construction, which makes practically indefinite height possible. Below we see the Conestoga Building with a couple of its great-grandchildren behind it: One PPG Place and Fifth Avenue Place.