An apartment tower that was part of the original Chatham Center complex, designed by William Lescaze with Pittsburgh’s Harry Lefkowitz as the local architect. It opened in 1966.
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Chatham Tower
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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Four Gateway Center in Two Colors
Fujifilm FinePix HS10 with the Tritanopia filter in G’MIC. Four Gateway Center rendered in old-postcard colors for no particular reason.
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Shaare Torah Congregation, Squirrel Hill
The striking feature of this modernist synagogue is the huge relief over the entrance that symbolically depicts the Twelve Tribes of Israel surrounding the Tablets of the Law. The architects were Ben Friedman and Nathan Cantor, although Father Pitt has not yet sorted out whether they worked together or at different times.
Ground was broken for the first part of the building on April 20, 1947; first services were conducted September 3, 1948. Ground for the Rabbi Sivitz Memorial Talmud Torah and Main Building was broken August 17, 1952; it was dedicated on August 27, 1955.
This preliminary sketch for the synagogue was published on the cover of the Jewish Criterion, August 23, 1946. The sketch is quite different from the building as it stands, but obviously an early stage in the evolution of the same idea. Through the halftoning, we can just make out the name “Friedman” in the signature.
The symbols are taken from the prophecy of Jacob in Genesis 49:
Reuben, unstable as water;
Simeon and Levi: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations (but Simeon’s sword is mitigated by a wreath of olive, and Levi later became the priestly class, and thus is represented by a swinging censer);
Judah is a lion’s whelp;
Zebulun shall be for an haven of ships;
Issachar is a strong ass, crouching down between two burdens;
Dan shall be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward;
Gad, a troupe shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last;
Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties;
Naphthali is a hind let loose;
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall;
Benjamin shall raven as a wolf.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Fifth Avenue Place, Remodeled
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990. 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:
Samsung Digimax V4. 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.
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One Mellon Center
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Or BNY Mellon Center, or whatever it is called now that BNY Mellon is just BNY, seen from across the Mon.
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McGinley Hall, Duquesne University
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR. A massive new apartment tower for Duquesne University students, and a big improvement in the Uptown cityscape (it replaced a parking lot). The architects were Indovina Associates, who designed the building in a subdued version of the currently popular patchwork-quilt style, with materials that harmonize well with the other buildings along the Uptown corridor.
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Chatham Two
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR. Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman, a firm that began in Butler and grew to be an international architectural titan, would become famous in the middle 1980s for postmodernist buildings like Liberty Center. This building, however, is prepostmodernist. It opened in 1981, and it is a straightforward modernist box with a Miesian look. Although it doesn’t arrest our attention the way some of the firm’s later projects do, it was a harbinger of Renaissance II, the building boom of the 1980s that remodeled Pittsburgh with a postmodernist skyline.
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Distinguished International Style in the Suburbs
The developer Oliver Tyrone, who had built a high-class shopping center called Manor Oak on Cochran Road, brought in the New York firm of William N. Breger & Associates to design a high-class high-rise office building for the rising land behind the shops.1 In his early career, Breger had worked for Walter Gropius, and by 1966 his International Style credentials were well established. This building brought some distinguished modernist design to the quiet suburban landscape of Scott Township, and it still stands out as one of the more notable modernist office buildings in Pittsburgh suburbia.
It seems Mr. Tyrone’s investment was a success: two years later he started construction on a much larger nine-floor office building farther up the hill. Breger’s firm was once again in charge of the design,2 but instead of just repeating Manor Oak One but bigger, the architect made a completely different design—very Miesian to old Pa Pitt’s eye, though like many buildings inspired by Mies it narrows the Miesian colonnaded porch to vestigial width.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990. A native Pittsburgh architect might have adapted the buildings to their sloping site. But instead, the ground was completely leveled for each building, and the buildings could just as easily have grown in a flat city like New York.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with ultra-wide camera.
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Murray Towers, Squirrel Hill
Since it was built as public housing and opened in 1973, and since it bears a strong resemblance to his many other public-housing projects, Father Pitt does not hesitate to assign this building to Tasso Katselas, the king of public works in Pittsburgh.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR. An apartment fire fortunately was confined.
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St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Brookline
In honor of Reformation Day, here is a Lutheran church. O. M. Topp, for a generation the favorite choice of Lutherans, designed this neat Gothic church, which was built in 1929, as we see from the cornerstone.1 But, oddly, the cornerstone says that the church is the Sunday school.
That’s because things didn’t go exactly as planned. This was meant to become the Sunday-school wing, temporarily serving as the sanctuary until the much larger church was built. But then the Depression came, and then the war, and the big church was never built. Instead, when the congregation was finally ready to expand in 1960, it was decided to keep this building as the sanctuary, and a large modern Sunday-school wing was built beside it.
The architect’s drawing shows us that nothing on the outside has changed except for the encrustation of newer building to the left.
“New Church Planned in Brookline,” Pittsburgh Press, April 6, 1929, p. 28. 
The Sunday-school wing is in a very different style, but tall Gothic arches are meant to tie it to the earlier building.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR.
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