Father Pitt

Tag: Skyscrapers

  • Highland House, Highland Park

    Highland House

    Designed by Tasso Katselas, this 22-storey apartment tower opened in 1962. It has reverted to its original name, Highland House, after some years as “the Park Lane.”

    Highland House

    Many projects for skyscraper apartments or hotels were proposed for Highland Park, but this is the only one that ever succeeded. “A dramatic use of the Miesian glass cage formula applied to a 22 story apartment house” was how James D. Van Trump described it in “The Stones of Pittsburgh.” “Located on the edge of Highland Park it seems to float above a nearby reservoir.”

    Ground floor

    Miesian is a good term for it: the building adopts the colonnade of stilts that became the signature of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Many imitators of Mies seem to lose courage and make the peripteral colonnade a narrow and useless space; see, for example, the Westinghouse Building. Katselas, on the other hand, if anything exaggerated the width of the porch, so that the ground floor is reduced to a little entrance cage, leaving a big broad outdoor space under the shelter of twenty-one floors of steel and glass.

    Base of Highland House
    Stilts
    Highland House

  • Highland Building, East Liberty

    Highland Building, East Liberty
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    A long view down Baum Boulevard. This is the only remaining skyscraper in East Liberty. Another of about the same dimensions, designed by Frederick Osterling, used to stand next to it, but was torn down for a one-storey bank, which in turn was abandoned for years and then torn down for a six-storey apartment block with storefronts—East Liberty’s history as a neighborhood epitomized in one lot. The skyscraper apartment buildings designed by Tasso Katselas in the “urban renewal” years are also gone. This one, designed by Daniel Burnham, has Burnham’s usual elegant classicism. In some ways Burnham was one of the most adventurous architects the United States ever produced, but part of the secret to his success was his ability to use the most modern technology to please the most conservative taste.

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  • Entrance to the Alcoa Building

    Entrance to the Alcoa Building
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    To old Pa Pitt’s eye, this is the most charming part of the Alcoa Building, famous for introducing aluminum as a material for the shell of a skyscraper. The rest of the building still looks like a stack of 1950s television sets to him, but this projection, with its angled glass and staggered panes and weird little space-age hoop, is what he wishes the whole building looked like.

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  • Entrance to the Koppers Building

    Koppers Building

    This is the lushest Art Deco of all our Art Deco skyscrapers. Graham, Anderson, Probst & White were the architects. The firm was one of the successors to Daniel Burnham’s practice, although Burnham would hardly have recognized the world of skyscraper design by 1929, when this building opened.

    Entrance to the Koppers Building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • FNB Financial Center

    FNB Financial Center

    Our newest skyscraper, with a bonus bus coming toward you and a reflection of the Gulf Building. Opened just last year in 2024, this is the sixteenth-tallest skyscraper in Pittsburgh and the second-tallest outside downtown, after the Cathedral of Learning. It was designed by Gensler, the world’s largest architecture factory, which was also responsible for the Tower at PNC Plaza. Old Pa Pitt cannot help feeling that the Tower at PNC Plaza got the A unit at Gensler, whereas this one got the C unit. But it is an attempt, after sixty years, to fulfill the promises of redevelopment that were made when the Lower Hill was cleared.

    FNB Financial Center
    FNB Financial Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • The Mon Wharf in the 1890s

    Mon Wharf in the 1890s
    From History and Commerce of Pittsburgh and Environs, 1894.

    The busy and chaotic Mon Wharf, where goods were loaded and unloaded and passengers came to board downstream-bound steamboats. This picture was published in 1894, and we can see the dawn of the skyscraper age just beginning to break: the Conestoga Building, finished in 1892, was the first building in Pittsburgh built on a steel frame, and one of the first in the world.

    Conestoga Building

    The view is quite different today (or in 2021, when these pictures were taken), though many of the same buildings are there. The Robert Moses plan ringed downtown Pittsburgh with expressways, as Moses had done with Manhattan, cutting off the people from the rivers. It was an understandable adaptation: if there must be expressways, the riverfronts made space for them without knocking down a lot of buildings. But it took us decades to begin to reclaim the shores with a system of parks and bicycle trails.

    Firstside in May of 2021
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  • How Many of These Pittsburgh Skyscrapers Can You Name?

    How many of these Pittsburgh skyscrapers can you name? Advertisement for Alcoa aluminum

    From The Pittsburgh Bicentennial in 1958, an advertisement for Alcoa aluminum as the new wonder material in construction. All these buildings are still standing, though the Heinz Food Research Center badly needs a rescue.

  • Knoxville

    Knoxville, Pittsburgh

    The slopes of Knoxville, an independent borough until it was taken into Pittsburgh in 1927. Below, two very different towers: the tower of St. Canice on the left and the U. S. Steel Tower on the right.

    Two towers
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • United Steelworkers Building

    United Steelworkers building

    It occurred to old Pa Pitt this afternoon that he had never seen a complete picture of the front of this building. It took several photographs and some technical fussing to get the composite picture above, but here you are.

    Entrance
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    We also have pictures of the building from Mount Washington and from Gateway Center Park, as well as pictures of the base of the building.

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  • Allegheny General Hospital

    Allegheny General Hospital seen from Eloise Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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