Father Pitt

Tag: Grant Street

  • Reliefs by Henry Hering on the Federal Reserve Bank Building

    Eagle by Henry Hering

    This building, put up in 1930–1931, was a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and the Clevelanders Walker & Weeks were the architects—but with Henry Hornbostel and Eric Fisher Wood as “consulting architects.”1 Old Pa Pitt doesn’t know exactly how far the consulting went. At any rate, the architects chose sculptor Henry Hering, who had done several prominent decorations in Cleveland, to create the cast-aluminum reliefs for this building. The picture below is from 2015, but it will serve to show the placement of the reliefs:

    Federal Reserve Bank Building

    The three main figures are obviously allegorical; they seem to represent industry, agriculture, and the professions.

    Relief by Henry Hering
    Relief
    Relief
    Decoration in aluminum
    1. Source: Walter Kidney, Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch, where this building is no. 137 in the List of Works. ↩︎

  • U. S. Steel Tower from Grant Street

    U. S. Steel Tower

    With the aid of a very wide-angle lens, we can see the whole face of the tallest building in Pittsburgh from Grant Street. This was a very tall building when it was put up: it was the eighth-tallest in the world, and the tallest outside New York and Chicago. Now it doesn’t crack the top two hundred, but it is still record-breakingly massive in one way: no other building has a roof that big that high. Other tall buildings taper; this one goes straight up.

  • Tower of the Courthouse

  • Koppers and Gulf Buildings, with the Federal Reserve Bank

    Koppers and Gulf Bldgs., with the Federal Reserve Bank at the Right

    An old postcard from Father Pitt’s accumulation of Pittsburgh miscellanea; we do not know the date, but it must be before 1952, since the back of the card specifies “PLACE ONE CENT STAMP HERE.”

  • Top of the Frick Building, Tower of the Courthouse

    A little slice of skyline seen from the South Side Slopes.

  • BNY Mellon Center

    Our second-tallest building opened in 1983 as One Mellon Center. It was actually meant to be the Dravo Building, but Dravo disappeared before the building was finished. There were plans to surround it with matching smaller buildings, but the 1980s boom went bust, and those buildings never happened.

    The architects were Welton Becket and Associates—clearly the Associates in this case, since Mr. Becket himself died in 1969. (He is, however, credited with this and nearly three dozen other posthumous buildings in his Wikipedia article.)

  • Grant Street in 2000

    Grant Street in 2000

    Photographed on Elite Chrome 100 film with a Kodak Retinette.

  • Grant Building from First Avenue

    Grant Building

    When Henry Hornbostel’s Grant Building first went up in 1929, it was festooned with Art Deco pinnacles that were removed decades ago. If you enlarge this picture of the south side of the building, you can just make out the shadows left by those vanished ornaments.

  • One Oxford Centre from First Avenue

    Designed by the huge international firm Hellmuth, Obata, & Kassabaum, this nest of octagons was one of many landmark skyscrapers that popped up like mushrooms in the boom of the 1980s.

  • Fortune and Her Wheel

    This window by the celebrated stained-glass master John La Farge looks out over the lobby of the Frick Building. The metaphor of Fortune’s wheel is an odd one for a self-made gazillionaire to choose: Henry Frick was not known for his modesty, and yet the message seems to be that he was just lucky rather than clever.