Building Pittsburgh: City Architecture
When we think of architecture in Pittsburgh, our minds jump to some likely suspects: the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, the Cathedral of Learning, PPG Place. What’s noticeable about this list? The fact that there isn’t really a cohesive or dominant “style” in town; modernist structures like the Alcoa Building sit side by side with Romanesque, Italianate, and Gothic buildings in the Golden Triangle. Outside of downtown, residences range from the mansions of Fifth Avenue, to the Victorians of Shadyside, to the row houses of Lawrenceville, to the single frame homes that cover the slopes of Mt. Washington. Why, exactly, is Pittsburgh’s architectural history so eclectic?
Denny posing in front of the Allegheny County Courthouse- the third, and most recent, incarnation, dedicated in 1888. An example of the Romanesque Revival style favored by Bostonian architect H. H. Richardson, the building’s design resulted from a solicitation of submissions from 100 architects.
Pittsburgh History and Landmark Foundation writer and historian Walter Kidney attempts an explanation in his 1997 book Pittsburgh’s Landmark Architecture. Citing other East Coast cities as being “less violent to their environments than the Pittsburgh-area industrial town,” Kidney suggests that since Pittsburgh’s history of economic strength lay more in industry than in the commercial trading centers of, say, New York and Boston, our architecture developed in a less planned fashion. He mentions that the great accomplishment of architecture in Pittsburgh is in the way the buildings accentuate our unique physical landscape, “serrating the skyline of a hill, clinging to a distant slope, or riding the edges of a street that dips and rises with the land.”
The assertion that Pittsburgh’s architectural history has been greatly influenced by the city’s economic development seems to hold a lot of weight. In Denny’s era, the style of buildings was changing in stature with the newly-declared city itself, evolving from log cabins to more Georgian-style structures as the city developed the necessary trade, wealth, and resources to do so. Throughout the 19th century, more “classically” styled buildings appeared, like the Gothic Trinity Episcopal Church built in 1824 (which was replaced in 1872 with the similarly Gothic building that stands today, in order to accommodate the growing congregation), and the Greek Revivalist Allegheny County Courthouse which stood from 1841 to 1882. The second Courthouse fell victim to a fire, which was an all too common fate for many Pittsburgh structures in the 1800s, including the first buildings of the Western University of Pennsylvania, and approximately a third of the entire city in the Great Fire of 1845.
The Burke Building, located across from PPG Place on Fourth Avenue, is downtown’s last surviving example of Greek Revivalism. Built in 1836 by John Chislett, Pittsburgh’s first professional architect, it was a key office building in Pittsburgh’s early economic center. Today it is Pittsburgh’s oldest surviving commercial structure, and was placed on the National Register of Historic places in 1978.
Pittsburgh’s industrial heyday saw the development of very divergent types of construction. Two buildings associated with Henry Clay Frick exemplify two types of architecture that reflected the nature of industrial city. Grant Street’s Frick Building was built by the magnate as the center of his business enterprises- purposefully overshadowing an adjacent building owned by his former partner and later foe Andrew Carnegie. This turn-of-the-century skyscraper, designed in the Chicago School style, exemplified the growing might of the “robber barons,” which wasn’t a unique trait to Pittsburgh. The downtown building complemented the Gilded Age Italianate mansion named Clayton, today the home of the Frick Pittsburgh, which Frick had remodeled to showcase his wealth and stature. How the other half lived, though, was nowhere near as grand; smaller single frame homes, tenements, “patch houses,” and imposing but dangerous steel mills were facts of life for most Pittsburghers.
Housing for the majority of Pittsburghers was less grandiose than that of the Fricks, Mellons, and other industrialists. The above image shows a row of tenement housing in the South Side in 1917, with the Wabash Bridge in the background. Later, companies did try to improve conditions for their workers, such as when Jones and Laughlin hired architect Ralph Griswold to make improvements to its company towns. The below photograph shows such construction done for workers at the American Steel & Wire Company in Donora at the same time period.
The 20th century saw changes in both the public and private spheres. Attempts at improved middle-class housing, such as Chatham Village in Mt. Washington, were successful, but never replicated on the same scale. Many Pittsburghers spread out into more outlying city neighborhoods and the suburbs, where California bungalows, Foursquare style, and post-war houses quickly dominated the landscape. Downtown, modern industrial buildings began to look more like advertisements for company products than the skyscrapers of the Frick era. The Alcoa Building, Steel Tower, and PPG Place all served to demonstrate the functional and aesthetic possibilities of aluminum, steel, and glass, respectively.
United States Steel’s new office building at 525 William Penn Place was designed specifically to be sleek, “strikingly modern,” and, above all, demonstrate that steel could be beautiful as well as strong. An early 1950s brochure declared the tower “unlike any other building in the world.” Within 20 years, the company would move its headquarters, this time to its current home at the U.S. Steel Tower. Again, they made a point of showcasing product innovation, this time by placing the weather-resistant Cor-ten steel beams on the outside of the building.
The Pittsburgh Renaissance heavily impacted the city’s skyline, in some ways for the better, and some for the worse. The development of the Point from a railyard to a public park, for instance, highlighted Pittsburgh’s ambition to shed its smoky, industrial past. However, some victims of the redevelopment raised public ire, including the demolition of the Fort Pitt Hotel, the Smithfield Methodist Church, and Syria Mosque in Oakland. The razing of large swaths of the Hill District raised an outcry from the neighborhood community that was cleared to build the Civic Arena in the 1950s; in turn, the Arena’s demolition in 2012 was met by consternation and an unsuccessful effort to get the building certified as a National Historic Landmark.
No discussion of architecture in Pittsburgh would be complete without mentioning the Cathedral of Learning, the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere. Architect Charles Klauder’s design wasn’t perhaps as well-received as one would think, especially now that the Cathedral is one of Pittsburgh’s most recognizable landmarks. In an era before the Pitt campus had overtaken Oakland, neighborhood residents- and even some University officials- disapproved of the grandiose design.
Today, Pittsburgh is at the forefront of the green building movement, among the top 10 in the country in cities with LEED-certified buildings. The David Lawrence Convention Center, for example, was certified as the first green convention center in the nation. Suburban growth continues outward, with tract homes and developments stretching from Allegheny into the surrounding counties. In the city itself, residential housing has increasingly focused on redevelopment of existing structures, particularly in neighborhoods like Lawrenceville. Gentrification in places like East Liberty, on the other hand, has become a matter of contention, with the destruction of older neighborhoods making way for newer, more modern, and more expensive apartments and condos. As always, the look of Pittsburgh is constantly changing, reflecting the development of the city itself.
Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of the Union Arcade, now called the Union Trust Building. A Flemish Gothic building designed by one of Pittsburgh’s most famous architects, Frederick Osterling, the building was intended to compete with New York City’s Woolworth Building. Osterling’s signatures can be found in a multitude of other Pittsburgh structures, including Henry Clay Frick’s Clayton, Allegheny Middle School, Armstrong Cork Company (now the Cork Factory Lofts), and additions made to the Allegheny County Jail.
- Ashley Taylor












