Now the Smithfield United Church of Christ, and it has had several other names. This lacy spire has an honored place in history as the first structural use of aluminum. (The aluminum point on the Washington Monument was just a lump of aluminum set on top, not a structure.) The architect Henry Hornbostel’s other experiment in this building, the use of decorative concrete panels on the exterior walls, has not held up as well; for years the rest of the building has been shrouded in netting to prevent bits of concrete from raining on pedestrians. Below is a picture Father Pitt took of the tower in 2000, before the shrouds went up.
The giant Kaufmann’s department store grew in stages over decades. This part of it was designed by Charles Bickel, who decorated it with exceptionally fine terra-cotta ornaments.
First put up in 1913 (replacing a clock on a post that had stood here earlier), the Kaufmann’s clock is one of the famous sights of Pittsburgh. It keeps time, too.
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.
Pittsburghers know it as the Gimbels Building, because for most of the twentieth century it was the home of the Gimbels department store in Pittsburgh. But it was built for the Kaufmann & Baer Company, which Gimbels bought out a few years later.
In November of 1913, this colossal department store was still going up. But in the front of the directory that went to every telephone subscriber in Pittsburgh was this beautifully executed rendering, part of a full-page ad to build up enthusiasm for the store’s opening in the spring of 1914. The architects were Starrett & Van Vleck, specialists in department stores; the drawing is signed with a name that Father Pitt could not read, but he is fairly certain it was neither Starrett nor Van Vleck. Probably it was a draftsman in their office, and in old Pa Pitt’s opinion they could not have paid that employee enough. It’s a first-rate piece of work.
“The vast new building of the Kaufmann & Baer Company,” said the advertisement, “having a floor area of about 800,000 square feet (nearly 20 acres), will be opened for business in the Spring 1914. It will be not only the BIGGEST, but also the BEST and MOST MODERN shopping center in the city of Pittsburgh. Its stocks will be the largest and most varied; its prices, the lowest. It will be the store for ALL THE PEOPLE.”
It would not be possible to get a photograph from the same angle, either in 1913 or today, without picking up the Oliver Building and setting it aside somewhere. The closest old Pa Pitt could come to replicating the angle of the drawing with a photograph from his collection was this:
The Kaufmanns in the name, by the way, were a different branch of the same Kaufmann family that owned that other department store a block away.
This building was put up in two stages. It was built in 1902 as a seven-story building; two years later six more floors were added. Originally it had a cornice and a Renaissance-style parapet at the top, without which it looks a little unfinished.
From The Builder, April 1904. The architect, as we see in the caption, was James T. Steen, who had a thriving practice designing all sorts of buildings, including many prominent commercial blocks downtown. This was probably his largest project.
This picture has been manipulated on two planes to give the building a more natural perspective than is really possible in Pittsburgh’s narrow streets, at the cost of distorting a few other things.
The Mellons ordered a bank that would convey the impression of rock-solid stability. It was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, who would later design the even more imposing Federal Building and the Gulf Building, both also Mellon projects. (We call the Federal Building a Mellon project because Andrew W. Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury who specified it and wrote his name on it in bronze.) It was a Lord & Taylor department store for about four years in the early 2000s, for which the splendid interior was mostly destroyed. Later, PNC took it over as a call center, and restored some of the bits of interior that were left.
The sun was glaring and the shadows were deep, but as far as old Pa Pitt knows, these composite photographs are the only complete elevations of the Park Building on the Internet. Above, the Smithfield Street face; below, the Fifth Avenue face.
And, of course, the most striking feature of the building: the telamones that hold up the roof.
The Park Building, built in 1896, is Pittsburgh’s oldest extant skyscraper. (The Carnegie Building, demolished in 1952, was a year earlier.) George B. Post of New York was the architect, and he designed it in the florid Beaux Arts style that would also be usual in the earliest New York skyscrapers. Although it was damaged decades ago by an ill-conceived modernization, the basic outlines and much of the ornament are intact. It displays all the attributes of an early New York skyscraper—the attributes that became dogma for early skyscrapers across the country. (See “The Convention in Sky-Scrapers.”) And with good reason: a bunch of these skyscrapers may create a certain monotony in the skyline, but following the Beaux Arts skyscraper formula reliably produces a good-looking building.
“Form follows function,” as Louis Sullivan said. Modernist architects used that saying as a slogan (which probably annoyed Mr. Sullivan) meaning that the form of a building should express the structural functions of the parts. But the form of a Beaux Arts skyscraper expresses the social functions of its parts: it makes visible what different parts of the building do, in a way that modernist architecture often fails to accomplish.
The basic formula for early skyscrapers is base, shaft, and cap. “A convention of treating them as columns with a decorated capital, a long plain central shaft, and a heavier base, was early adopted,” as the Architectural Record said in 1903.
The base—usually the first two floors—is the public part of the building, where retail shops or banking halls and such things are located—where, in short, the public interacts with the main business of the building.
The shaft, which is usually a repeating pattern of windows and wall, is where the ordinary business offices of the skyscraper are located.
Up in the stratospheric heights of the cap are the very most important people—the princes of commerce, and the lackeys and flunkeys who attend to their needs.
Now look at the Park Building, and you will see that the third floor, though more or less part of the shaft, is outlined and set apart from the rest. This is the bosses’ floor, in which the important men who supervise what goes on downstairs are located.
Just by looking at the face of the building, you can tell what goes on in each of its parts, which is not true of a modernist glass box. Here the social functions of each floor are made visible in stone and brick. Although the form is not structural, in a human sense this is form following function.
