Mount Washington

Pittsburgh’s architectural legacy rose with its emergence as a capital of industry, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries when tycoons built some of the nation’s first skyscrapers in the Golden Triangle, through construction booms beginning in the 1950s and lasting nearly 40 years, to a 21st-century burst that brought new stadiums on the North Shore and more skyscrapers Downtown. Among the city’s notable structures are One PPG Place, built in 1983 as the headquarters of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Industries and designed by Philip Johnson as a glass-clad gothic skyscraper inspired by the Cathedral of Learning; the Alcoa Building, built in 1953 as the headquarters of the Aluminum Company of America and notable as the world’s first skyscraper with an all-aluminum exterior; the Gulf Tower, completed in 1932 as Gulf Oil Corporation’s headquarters and once Pittsburgh’s tallest building until the U.S. Steel Tower was completed in 1970; and the U.S. Steel Tower, completed in 1971 as the tallest building in the U.S. outside New York and Chicago and still the city’s tallest building. Also prominent are the 42-story Cathedral of Learning, completed in the mid-30s in gothic revival style with classrooms reflecting 29 nationalities that influenced Pittsburgh’s growth; the Fort Pitt Bridge and Tunnel, whose 1959 bridge alignment helped enable Point State Park’s development, followed in 1969 by the Fort Duquesne Bridge linking the Point with the North Shore; Point State Park and the Fort Pitt Museum at the meeting of the three rivers, where Fort Duquesne was first established by the French in the 1750s and Fort Pitt was later built by the British, with the original Fort Pitt blockhouse surviving; Gateway Center, created after World War II as part of Downtown’s transformation, with its first office tower erected in 1952 and the rest completed by 1960; the “Firstside” row of 18th-century Greek Revival, Italianate, and Victorian buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard that once served businesses and warehouses on the Mon Wharf; the Smithfield Street Bridge, opened in 1883 and one of the oldest steel bridges in the United States; the Allegheny County Courthouse and old jail, completed in 1888 and designed by Henry Hobson Richardson around an interior courtyard; the former Pittsburgh Terminal Station, built in 1900 after the 1879 opening of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad and later redeveloped in 1976 as Station Square; and Mellon Hall of Science, dedicated in 1968 on the Duquesne University campus and designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · United States