When Tasso Katselas designed the annex to the May Building (which was designed by Charles Bickel), modernism was not just fashion—it was dogma. Fashions have changed and dogmas have relaxed, and the annex is being remodeled to be less aggressively different from the original building. We’ll have more pictures as the remodeling takes shape.
Originally called the McCance Block after its owner, this came to be known as the Triangle Building for obvious reasons. As Father Pitt has mentioned before, it fills what may be one of the smallest downtown city blocks in the country, so that every side of a relatively small building faces the street.
Andrew Peebles was probably the architect—but old Pa Pitt has not sorted that out completely yet, because he has also heard of Thomas Scott as the architect. His current hypothesis is that the building rose in two stages: the first four floors by Peebles, and the top two floors, which are simpler and built with brick of a very slightly different shade, by Scott some years later. The building has recently been refurbished for (you guessed it) luxury apartments.
The distinctive arched top of the CNG Tower, now known as EQT Plaza, one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite postmodernist buildings in the city.
Now called EQT Plaza, this is one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite Postmodernist buildings from the 1980s “Renaissance II” boom. The architect was William Pederson of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.
Four Gateway Center rendered in old-postcard colors for no particular reason.
The shopping arcade at Fifth Avenue Place, like almost all indoor shopping arcades and a good many enclosed shopping malls, withered and emptied, so advertising it on the Liberty Avenue entrance no longer made sense. The new entrance is much more restrained, modernist rather than postmodernist. This, in case you don’t remember, is what it used to look like:
Father Pitt will not fault the tasteful modernism of the new design in isolation—in fact he thinks it makes a good picture—but it does not fit the spirit of Reagan-era excess in the building itself. It would have been better to leave the old entrance, with its gold-foil arch and its giant clock, and just remove the signs.
It is a rule, however, that the style of the previous generation is always the most embarrassing, and the style of the generation before it is always to be preferred. It seems to old Pa Pitt that today’s architects and builders are embarrassed by the exuberant postmodernism of the 1980s, and are taking every opportunity to remold it into fussily correct International Style modernism, exactly the same way their ancestors of a century ago were embarrassed by the exuberant Victorianism of the 1880s and were taking every opportunity to remold it into fussily correct classicism.
The Keenan Building, designed by Thomas Hannah for the Colonel Keenan who had built the Press into the city’s leading newspaper, was elaborately decorated. Although the shaft was modernized somewhat half a century ago, most of the decorations remain, and among them we find portraits in terra cotta of people who were considered important to Pittsburgh when the building was erected in 1907.
William Penn, the Proprietor, who gave Pennsylvania a republican form of government.
William Pitt, friend of the Colonies, for whom Pittsburgh was named.
George Washington, Father of His Country.
Stephen Foster, at the time Pittsburgh’s most famous composer.
Mary Schenley, who owned half the city and donated Schenley Park.
Andrew Carnegie, who was a big deal.
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States.
Edwin Stuart, Governor of Pennsylvania.
George Guthrie, Mayor of Pittsburgh.
There are faces on the second floor as well, but they are identical decorative faces.
More of the Victorian business district of Bloomfield, from the age when it was a very German neighborhood. We begin with a building we have seen before, which has just finished a renovation and is ready for another century and a quarter of use. The tall third floor, as old Pa Pitt remarked before, looks like an assembly room of some sort.
The rest of these buildings all date from the 1890s.
The date stone gives us the date 1890 and the name of the owner, P. Biedenbach.
Two of a row of modest houses with storefronts put up in the 1890s.
A building that preserves its corner entrance, though not the original treatment of it.
Elaborate brickwork distinguishes this building from its neighbors.
Another small storefront with living quarters above.
