Two abstract views of the newer Alcoa Building on the North Shore at the end of the Seventh Street Bridge. The one above was taken with a Lubitel TLR; the one below was taken with an Imperial plastic “toy” TLR.
Obviously old Pa Pitt is still rummaging through his large library of old pictures.
This is classicism walking the knife edge between Art Deco on the one side and modernism on the other. The architect was George H. Schwan, a Pittsburgher whose only other major commission in town that old Pa Pitt knows about is the Twentieth Century Club in Oakland. [Update: The Twentieth Century Club is usually attributed to Benno Janssen. Schwan may also have designed the Natatorium Building in Oakland, or the renovations that made it into a movie theater.] Schwan did not starve, however: he was a much-employed designer of attractive smaller houses, and his most famous commission was designing practically all the original buildings in the model Akron suburb of Goodyear Heights.
Addendum: Father Pitt knows of more works by Schwan than he did when he wrote this article. See the Great Big List of Buildings and Architects for old Pa Pitt’s latest research.
We’ve seen this building elsewhere, from an angle, but here is old Pa Pitt’s best attempt (so far) at seeing it head-on from the front, the way the architects (Dowler & Dowler) might have drawn it back in 1956. The picture is a composite, and there are stitching errors if you examine it closely; but it still gives a better impression of the design of the building than any other picture of it that Father Pitt has seen.
One of the building’s most attractive features is the Pennsylvania relief with rotating globe, illustrating the slogan “Anywhere Any Time by Telephone.” The relief shows outsized Pittsburgh as “Gateway to the West,” and the clearly less important Philadelphia as home of the Liberty Bell and City Hall. The globe used to rotate to show the part of the earth currently illuminated by sunlight; but both the globe and the clock above it have stopped, and the plastic window over the globe is sadly fogged. Now that the building has become luxury apartments, perhaps an enlightened ownership will put a little money into restoring what used to be one of downtown’s unique attractions.
This is one of several works by Harrison and Abramovitz on Pittsburgh’s skyline—the most prominent, of course, being the U. S. Steel Tower, which dwarfs everything else. This one was built in 1953, making it probably the first of their works here. It was also the first aluminum-faced skyscraper (appropriate for the biggest aluminum producer in the world). To Father Pitt, it always looks like a stack of 1950s television sets.
