An eighteen-storey condominium tower built in 2007. Back then, only fifteen years ago, it was the first condominium tower put up in downtown Pittsburgh in nearly forty years. It proved that such an enterprise could be profitable.
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151 First Side
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Gateway Center
The Point was mostly a run-down warehouse district after the Second World War, which made it an ideal showcase for the modernist ideal of urban redevelopment. The part nearest the confluence of the rivers was set aside for a park (which took a quarter-century to realize), and the rest was demolished to make way for gleaming modern towers. It was a great success, and it probably did untold damage here and in other cities. Its success convinced a generation of urban planners that the key to prosperous development was to replace crowded urban districts with sterile modern towers. It almost never worked; Gateway Center was a lucky anomaly, and old Pa Pitt would suggest that the park and landscaping had more to do with its success than the architecture of the buildings—although he does think the three original Gateway Center towers (the silver cruciform towers in the middle right of this picture) are masterpieces of their kind. That, too, was a lucky accident: they were meant to be sheathed in brick, which would have made them pedestrian stacks of offices, but postwar shortages made it more economical to give them the gleaming metal surfaces you see here.
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Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown
This hotel was built in 1959 as the Pittsburgh Hilton & Towers. It was probably meant by its architect to have the elegance of simplicity, and no one will argue about the simplicity. In the 2000s it was decided to add an egregiously mismatched postmodern front to the building; the Hilton, though, seemed to be constantly running out of money, and the addition sat half-finished for years. It was finally completed under the new owners.
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Round Bank in Squirrel Hill
From the “form follows function” era of the middle twentieth century comes this round bank. Round is probably the most impractical and anti-functional shape you could come up with for a bank, but modernism sacrificed function for a striking effect much more often than Victorian classicism did. This was built in 1965 for Mellon Bank. It now belongs to Citizens Bank, which bought Mellon’s retail branches when Mellon merged with Bank of New York and decided not to deal with grubby working-class people anymore.
Addendum: The architect was Pittsburgh-based Harry Lefkowitz.
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U. S. Steel Tower
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Mellon Hall, Duquesne University
It is surprising to discover, considering how many of his buildings sprouted in other cities, that this is the only building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Pittsburgh. (The IBM Building in Allegheny Center was by his architectural firm, but the design was actually by one of his minions in his Chicago office.) It is an unusually long and low building by his standards, but it is otherwise a typical Miesian black box on stilts. Here we see it from across the river with a long lens.
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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.)
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U. S. Steel Tower
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Fifth Avenue Place Reflected in Four Gateway Center
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Making Lemonade on the South Side
“When life hands you lemons,” as the old saying goes, and here is an example of someone making pretty good lemonade out of some very unpromising lemons.
Three years ago the old St. Adalbert’s Auditorium looked like this.
Obviously it had been abandoned, and desultory attempts at maintenance had ground to a halt. This in spite of the fact that the church right next door was still active, and indeed still is today.
But now the same developer who converted St. Casimir’s to condominiums has taken this building in hand, turning it into fairly expensive condominiums under the name “The Auditorium.”
A sign in front tells us that nine out of fourteen units have already been sold. Considering that the building was a gymnasium, auditorium, and fallout shelter built in the most undistinguished modernist style, this is a very good outcome for a building that had been a festering eyesore in the neighborhood.
