Father Pitt

Tag: Skyscrapers

  • Two PNC Plaza

    Not one of our most famous or most distinguished buildings, but big: this is the thirteenth-tallest building in Pittsburgh—the twelfth-tallest downtown (leaving out the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland). It opened in 1976 as Equibank Plaza, and ended up in the hands of PNC after many mergers and acquisitions. Since PNC calls this “Two PNC Plaza,” its own current headquarters “One PNC Plaza,” the mixed-use skyscraper at the foot of Fifth Avenue “Three PNC Plaza,” and its new signature skyscraper “The Tower at PNC Plaza,” old Pa Pitt is forced to conclude that PNC thinks of the whole Golden Triangle as “PNC Plaza.”

  • Oliver Building

    Henry W. Oliver wanted to leave a mark on Pittsburgh, and he certainly did. Virgin Alley was renamed Oliver Avenue, and he planned this building to be the tallest in Pittsburgh. It was the tallest when it opened in 1910, although Oliver himself didn’t live to see it finished. As architect, he hired Daniel Burnham, the great Chicago beaux-arts master for whom Pittsburgh was practically a second home—there are more Burnham buildings here than anywhere else but Chicago.

  • Skyscrapers, Old and New

    The Tower at PNC Plaza under construction in March of 2015. In front of it, three of the Fourth Avenue towers: the Benedum-Trees Building (1905, architect Thomas H. Scott), the Investment Building (1927, architect John M. Donn), and the Arrott Building (1902, architect Frederick Osterling).

  • Lower Fifth Avenue

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.

    In the distance, the Tower at PNC Plaza looms over the next block.

  • Four Gateway Center

    A 1960 skyscraper by the prolific Harrison & Abramovitz (who also gave us the U. S. Steel Tower, the Westinghouse Building, and the Alcoa Building). Father Pitt thinks it looks better as an architect’s rendering than in person. He has therefore made his photograph (merged from three separate photographs) look as much like an architect’s rendering as possible.

  • Under Construction

    For the first time since the boom of the 1980s, two skyscrapers are going up at once downtown. The Tower at PNC Plaza has topped out, and Tower Two-Sixty at The Gardens is rising on Forbes Avenue just up the street from the Diamond. We can see one of the cranes and a bit of the skeleton of the latter between two of the Fourth Avenue bank towers.

    Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.

  • Skyline from the West End Overlook

    Elliott is a forgotten city neighborhood in western Pittsburgh, the most forgotten section of the city. But in the West End Overlook, it does have the best viewing post for straight-on pictures of the Point.

  • Gulf Tower from Frank Curto Park

    The Gulf Tower, with the Koppers Tower (left) and partly completed Tower at PNC Plaza (right). As time goes on, every skyscraper that used to be a “building” changes its name to “tower.”

  • One Oxford Centre

    Spelled “Centre” because the conventional wisdom in the real-estate business holds that you can raise the rents if you use a British spelling. Here we see it from the Diamond. This nest of octagons is, depending on how you measure it, our fifth-tallest building, one foot shorter than Fifth Avenue Place. The top, however, is higher than the top of Fifth Avenue Place or even PPG Place (our third-tallest), because downtown slopes upward toward Grant Street, so One Oxford Centre is built on higher ground.

    The first few floors of this building are a shopping arcade connected by a meandering skywalk to the Kaufmann’s (now Macy’s) department store a few blocks away

    One Oxford Centre is a short walk from either the Steel Plaza or the First Avenue subway station.

  • A New Tower Rises

    2013-07-18-PNC-Tower-01

    The Tower at PNC Plaza, the biggest skyscraper project in Pittsburgh since the 1980s, has just begun to rise at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street. Traditionally skyscrapers have grown in a doughnut-shaped area of the Golden Triangle, with the hole in the Fifth Avenue shopping district; but now that much of the shopping has moved elsewhere, the hole may begin to fill in.