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Tower Two-Sixty
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Four Gateway Center
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Geometric Patterns Through the Branches
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Stairwell of the People’s Savings Bank Building
This unusual external stairwell behind the People’s Savings Bank Building is one of the architectural curiosities of Fourth Avenue. Old Pa Pitt caught it when it was briefly illuminated by reflected sunlight.
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Alcoa Building
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.
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Fifth Avenue Place from Fifth Avenue
It is one of old Pa Pitt’s endearing quirks that he likes to take pictures with a bus coming toward the viewer.
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Clark Building
The Clark Building, designed by the Hoffman-Henon Co of Philadelphia, was built in 1927 at the same time as the Stanley Theater by the same architects. This late-Beaux-Arts skyscraper has for a long time been the center of the jewelry district downtown, with at least a dozen jewelers in the building (“over thirteen,” a sign on the building says, meaning, what, fourteen?) and more within a block or so.
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River Vue Apartments
The former State Office Building was designed by the firm of Altenhof and Bown (also responsible for the 1964 Federal Building on Grant Street; otherwise they seem to have specialized in schools). There was some grumbling when the state sold the building to private developers to be turned into luxury apartments, since space had to be found for the state employees, and some analyses suggested that the state would spend far more on leasing space than it would have spent on renovating the building. But it is certainly a first-rate location for apartments.
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Keenan Building
The Keenan Building in bright early-morning sunshine, seen from Sixth Avenue.
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Three Gateway Center
Three Gateway Center (1952, architects Eggers & Higgins), seen down the western end of Forbes Avenue from the Diamond. The distinctive stainless-steel facing of the first three Gateway Center towers was an afterthought, and a very lucky one. They were to be faced with brick, which would have made them humdrum undistinguished vertical warehouses like a thousand other modernist cruciform brick towers around the world. But bricks were in short supply after the Second World War, and for once budget constraints led to a much more pleasing result.
