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Early in Pittsburgh’s history, leisure time was hard to come by and, in some religions, even frowned upon; however, Pittsburgh’s upper class in the early 19th century was able to spend some of their time engaging in recreation, including fencing and dancing. Fox hunting became a popular communal activity and also a chance for elites to reinforce their positions as leaders in the community. Working class hunters utilized the hunts to undermine that very sentiment by ignoring or poking fun at those meant to lead the hunt. Horse racing also brought different classes together, this time as spectators, but with the same contentious results. By the 1840s Fourth of July festivities shifted from a time of celebration to a day of amusement and often included sports, such as boat races, foot races, marksmen contests, cricket, hunting and fishing.

Exposition Park in Allegheny City, later Pittsburgh's North Side, was an early home of the Pirates baseball team and Western University of Pennsylvania's football team, among other area sports teams in the late 19th century. At the conclusion of the Civil War, returning soldiers not only brought stories from the battlefield, but also newly learned forms of recreation, most notably the game of baseball. Several amateur teams developed throughout Pittsburgh in the years right after the war and in 1876 the Allegheny Base Ball Club, or Alleghenys, became the city’s first professional team. The following year the Alleghenys were a founding member of the International Association of Professional Base Ball Players, which was intended to be a rival to the National League, but later proved itself to be one of baseball’s first minor leagues. The Alleghenys fought with the more established local amateur clubs for talent and fans and folded in 1878. Another Alleghenys team formed in 1882 and played in the American Association before switching to the National League as the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1887. In 1890 the team fought with the Pittsburgh Burghers from the Players’ League for talent and spectators, but the player-run league could not compete with the established National League and folded after one season. In the aftermath of the demise of the Players’ League the Alleghenys not only sought to regain their best players, but also star players from other teams. Their acquisition of Lou Bierbauer from Philadelphia’s club was labeled ‘piratical’ and the Pittsburgh team embraced the insult, renaming themselves the Pirates. The club would go on to lose in the first ever World Series in 1903 and later win five of their own. The Pirates have become a storied franchise that boasts 44 Hall of Famers.

Forbes Field in Oakland was the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates (1909-1970), University of Pittsburgh football (1909-1924), the Homestead Grays (1922-1939), and the Pittsburgh Steelers (1933-1963), as well as the site of several boxing matches. Baseball’s popularity also spread to the African American community. The Pittsburgh Crawfords, based out of the Hill District, were very successful in the Negro League from 1931 to 1938 with players like Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige. Another team just outside the city, the Homestead Grays, were even more successful in the Negro Leagues. Once Major League Baseball was integrated, the Pirates were the first to field an all-minority starting lineup on September 1, 1971. In the 1870s and 1880s, rowing clubs exceeded the popularity of baseball clubs. Races would draw over 10,000 spectators and large purses for the winning teams. Other sports, like boxing and wrestling, were less formal and contests were often organized by fire companies and shops as a means of raising money through increased business and gambling. At the close of the century boxing became reliant on the athletic clubs of upper class Pittsburghers to supply organization, rules and purses, but the contests still held the interest of the working class.

Flat Denny and a friend took in a Pittsburgh Penguins game earlier this year at CONSOL Energy Center. Hockey came to Pittsburgh in 1895 and quickly grew in popularity once games shifted to Duquesne Gardens, which was the home of the city’s first National Hockey League franchise, the 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates’ coach, Odie Cleghorn, was the first to substitute his entire forward line in the middle of each period rather than leaving his best players in the ice for as long as possible, a forerunner to the modern line change. The Hornets and a few other professional teams played in Pittsburgh until the city was awarded an NHL expansion team, the Penguins, in 1966. The Pens were the primary tenant of the Civic Arena and struggled both on and off the ice until they drafted Mario Lemieux in 1984. Lemieux’s talent saved the team, winning two Stanley Cups in the 1990s and later, with the team facing bankruptcy, he purchased the franchise and built a new arena to keep the Penguins in Pittsburgh. The team, led by captain Sidney Crosby, has thrived in recent years and won two more Stanley Cups in 2009 and 2016. One of Pittsburgh’s most popular sports today is football. This sport gained momentum in eastern colleges like Harvard and Yale, and interest was then transferred to the area athletic clubs as the sons of the nouveau riche returned from school and became members. Two of the most prominent clubs were the Allegheny and Pittsburgh Athletic Associations and the competition between these two rivals led to the Pudge Heffelfinger being paid to play in a November 1892 game, making him the first professional football player. Semi-pro, professional and college teams all competed in Pittsburgh during the early 20th century with great success. In 1933 Art Rooney’s Pittsburgh Pirates franchise joined the National Football League. The team was renamed the Steelers in 1940, but continued to disappoint on the field until the 1970s when the Steelers won their first four Super Bowls. They would go on to add two more in the 2000s.

Radio station WJAS noted in 1956 that Pittsburgh was a sports town. Above are photos of Forbes Field, the Pirates, Steelers, Pitt football coach John Michelosen, and horse racing. The success of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers, as well as the 1976 University of Pittsburgh Panthers football team, earned Pittsburgh the nickname “The City of Champions,” thrusting the area’s love of sports into the national spotlight. With increased visibility in print, and perhaps more importantly on television, sporting events advertised Pittsburgh’s Renaissance and helped shed the idea that it was still a smoky city. Today, Pittsburgh proudly identifies itself as a “sports town” and, with all of its national championships, Olympians, hall of fame athletes and legions of fans, it’s hard to disagree.

               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