Now known as Two PNC Plaza, this building held an interesting architectural record. It was designed by Natalie de Blois (or DeBlois; old Pa Pitt sees it spelled both ways, and he is not willing to pay a spirit medium to contact the architect) for the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and when it opened in 1974 it was the largest building in the world ever designed by a woman. A block of Oliver Avenue was eliminated to make room for this skyscraper, but Oliver Avenue was never much of a street anyway.
This pleasing Victorian Romanesque commercial building was probably pushing the limits of height for its era: it was built in 1884, just before the dawn of the skyscraper age. Skyscrapers had not yet posed the problem of how to treat floor after floor in the upward rise of a building; the solution, even in the most ornate Beaux-Arts skyscrapers, turned out to be to treat the middle floors as identical repetitions (compare the later Renshaw Building to the left). That has not been done here. There are eight floors, and each of them different in some way.
This meticulously restored storefront probably had workshops of some sort on the second and third floors: look how the windows are arranged to maximize the penetration of natural light as far back into the building as possible. In fact the current tenants on the second floor apparently find it too penetrating, to judge by the effort they have put into blocking it. In our age of ubiquitous electrical illumination, we forget what a problem lighting was in the old days. Gas lighting was dimmer than electric, and it produced much more heat even than incandescent lighting, which was a serious disadvantage in the summer. Thus free sunlight—or, in Pittsburgh, attenuated smog light—was zealously hoarded.
This is not Father Pitt’s favorite building downtown, but it was one of the last works of a distinguished modern architect: William Lescaze, who died in 1969, the year after One Oliver Plaza was built. The building has had several names since then; it now goes by the name K&L Gates Center. Old Pa Pitt’s friend Dr. Boli has remarked that the names at the tops of the skyscrapers are a good index of who is most ruthlessly exploiting the masses at the moment. K&L Gates is a gigantic law firm.
The Maginn Building was put up in 1891, just three years after H. H. Richardson’s Allegheny County Courthouse opened. Even before the courthouse was finished, it had already created a mania for the “Richardsonian Romanesque” style in Pittsburgh, and the versatile Charles Bickel was happy to come through for any client who wanted an impressively Romanesque building.
This building was put up in 1886, and in 1892 a sixth floor was added. It appears that the pediment was from the original construction, moved up one level in 1892; the ornamental scrolls on the fifth floor would have accented the pediment very nicely.
As we often see in Victorian commercial buildings, what might appear to eyes trained on modernism as a cacophonous racket of detail turns out to be carefully organized, more a fugue than a racket. There are some interesting little outbreaks of randomness, however. Here are some of the delightful details you can pick out if you stand across the street from the building.
Connoisseurs of brutalism in architecture regard this as a remarkably fine example of the style. (Father Pitt could not find the architect with a short search, and he was not willing to do a long one.) “Brutalism” is the modernist school that makes its aesthetic statements through exposed raw concrete. The “raw” part is very important here: the architectural world blew a collective gasket when, in Washington, D.C., the Metro authorities responded to the increasing grubbiness of 1970s Brutalist subway stations by painting over the grime, which was blasphemy. Old Pa Pitt is not a great lover of brutalism (except for the Metro stations in Washington, which are like modernist cathedrals), but he can appreciate the care that went into making the most of concrete as a material in this building—the curved surfaces, the geometric forms, the play of light and shadow. It is also notable that, instead of killing the whole block, the builder put storefronts on the ground floor, so that some life could remain on the streets below the garage.
Now called just 606 Liberty Avenue, this was once a high-class department store. The odd-shaped building was designed by MacClure & Spahr, who gave us many distinguished buildings downtown. The odd shape was forced on this one by the oblique angle of the intersection of Liberty and Oliver Avenues. That last block of Oliver Avenue was later filled in to make PNC Plaza, but this building memorializes the intersection that used to be.
The front on both streets is covered—perhaps the appropriate word is festooned—with terra-cotta decorations. The style is a kind of fantasy Jacobean Renaissance, with wide arches coming to a very shallow not-quite point. Old James I only wished he could have buildings like this in his realm.
The Renshaw Building at Liberty Avenue and Ninth Street was built in 1910, with an extra floor added to the top at some time in the modernistic era. It’s a perfect miniature skyscraper, with base, shaft, cap, and the outlined bosses’ floor above the main floor. There are some good terra-cotta decorations, especially around the Ninth Street entrance.
