
…at the Koppers Building (left) and the Gulf Building (right).
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:
The three main figures are obviously allegorical; they seem to represent industry, agriculture, and the professions.
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.
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.)