Built in 1971, this is now number 23 on the list of tallest buildings in Pittsburgh. The architects were the venerable Chicago firm of A. Epstein and Sons.
To make a more realistic-looking rendition of the building than is optically possible, old Pa Pitt adjusted the perspective on two planes. This adjustment has comical effects on the background, but the main subject looks natural now.
The Keenan Building, designed by Thomas Hannah for the Colonel Keenan who had built the Press into the city’s leading newspaper, was elaborately decorated. Although the shaft was modernized somewhat half a century ago, most of the decorations remain, and among them we find portraits in terra cotta of people who were considered important to Pittsburgh when the building was erected in 1907.
William Penn, the Proprietor, who gave Pennsylvania a republican form of government.
William Pitt, friend of the Colonies, for whom Pittsburgh was named.
George Washington, Father of His Country.
Stephen Foster, at the time Pittsburgh’s most famous composer.
Mary Schenley, who owned half the city and donated Schenley Park.
Andrew Carnegie, who was a big deal.
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States.
Edwin Stuart, Governor of Pennsylvania.
George Guthrie, Mayor of Pittsburgh.
There are faces on the second floor as well, but they are identical decorative faces.
Built in 1906, this skyscraper was designed by Daniel Burnham, architect of the neighboring Frick Building, as the second part of Henry Frick’s architectural tantrum that cut off the light and air from the Carnegie Building. The Carnegie Building was demolished to make way for the nearly windowless Kaufmann’s Annex; this building, which gets plenty of light, is now luxury apartments.
The biggest skyscraper project since the Tower at PNC Plaza, this was billed as the nucleus of new development that will finally make good on the promises of prosperity made when the Lower Hill was cleared out in the 1960s. The design was by Gensler, a huge architecture conglomerate also responsible for the Tower at PNC Plaza.
Charles Bickel designed the May Building, and—as he often did—he made liberal use of terra cotta in the ornaments.
More pictures of the May Building.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
