If you like Downtown Pittsburgh, you'll probably like other programs in the Pittsburgh
Home Video Collection.
For information or to order, call Collect 412-622-1307 or write to QED Enterprises,
4802 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
This special WQED trip downtown was made possible by Gateway Center, managed and leased by Compass
Management and Leasing Inc., a subsidiary of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of
the U.S.
By Kaufmans, serving shoppers downtown since 1879, also now at six suburban Pittsburgh
locations.
By Pittsburgh National Bank, a PNC bank.
By the Pittsburgh Foundation, steward of more than 350 charitable funds for private donors,
and a supporter of the revitalization of downtown.
And by contributions from all the great people who are members of WQED.
This program is part of WQED's Pittsburgh History Series.
Since I was a kid, I've known that that red light downtown blinks on and off and spells
out the word Pittsburgh in Morse code.
Just watch.
There's dot, dash, dash, dot, the letter P. It goes on from there.
The light's an old air beacon that used to guide airplane pilots.
Now it's just one of those interesting things that you like to point out to people who come
to town.
One of those salient details that make Pittsburgh unique.
The city's full of them, and we're going to look at a lot of them.
We're going to go places where you usually don't get to go.
We're going to look off rooftops.
We're going to check out some of this city's secrets.
We've dug up some old movie footage that shows how things used to be.
And we're going to zip around town.
We'll look at a lot of buildings and listen to a lot of memories.
It all happens in the so-called Golden Triangle, where all the tall buildings are clustered
together.
We'll stay between the rivers and go no farther east than the Crosstown Boulevard.
It's the heart of the city, downtown Pittsburgh.
That's the title of this program.
Some people chuckle and ask if it's really going to be downtown, or will it be Don-Ton,
the way some Pittsburghers pronounce it.
I figure either way it's spelled the same.
One of the best things about this city is you can walk just about anywhere.
And as you walk around, you can sometimes find little surprises.
And if you walk around town with an architect like Don Carter, you can find out a lot about
how buildings reflect history.
Where we are right now is on 4th Avenue, which was known at one time as Pittsburgh's Wall
Street.
The reason being all the investment companies, the stock brokerage banks, all were located
here on 4th Avenue.
And it was this investment area that fueled the Industrial Revolution in Pittsburgh.
Most of the buildings here were designed in what's called the Beaux Arts style.
It uses classical forms, and here on 4th Avenue, many of the buildings have what you might
call a masculine, robust sort of look, powerful, like the economy back then.
Pittsburgh was the boom town.
People maybe don't remember that from their history books, but this is where really the
engine of the United States was, right here.
It was the coal industry, the steel industry, the coke industry, the aluminum industry,
the glass industry, chemicals, all were happening right here.
And there was a lot of money generated here, a lot of money passing from hand to hand on
this street.
And there was a lot of money spent on architectural details.
Everybody seems to like the sleepy brownstone lions at Dollar Bank.
The whole front, or facade, of that building is an explosion of Victorian grandeur.
Carved lions were popular around the turn of the century, and it's fun to find them
up and down this financial jungle of a street.
They must have inspired courage in those old bankers.
Some of these decorations are now old and dirty.
In the 19th century, Pittsburgh got an international reputation as a city covered with soot.
The United States Information Agency made a film about Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s.
Barely ten years ago, Pittsburgh was known by its inhabitants as the smoke center of
the earth, the smoky city.
No city anywhere in the world had more smoke than Pittsburgh had.
It was a grim city, a city you could taste in your mouth, a city that smarted in your
eyes.
Smoke blotted out the sun.
It filled the lungs of every man, woman, and child within its reach.
Nothing was free of its touch.
It must have been terrible.
The city was saved by an unusual amount of cooperation among business leaders, elected
officials, industries, and local citizens.
Working together as the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, they saved Pittsburgh
from death by pollution.
In fact, the city was reborn.
That's why they call it the Renaissance.
Today Pittsburgh is no longer wrapped in a mist of its own making.
Its rivers and skyscrapers can be seen from miles away by passengers of incoming planes.
Architects are once again sending their buildings soaring up into the sky, the clear blue sky
now.
The Gateway buildings were essentially the centerpiece of that first Renaissance.
Several Pittsburgh corporations made big commitments to the project and moved in.
Bill Evans worked for Pittsburgh Plate Glass back then and remembers that steel was chosen
for the outside of the gateways, but it was slightly unusual.
The stainless steel reflects the Korean War period in that I believe it's the chrome that
was very short in that era and therefore the stainless has a very high percentage of nickel
and virtually no chrome.
And so it appears slightly different than what you expect to see in the normal stainless
steel concept.
In order to build this gateway complex, the city had to clean up the area near the point.
As part of the Renaissance, they built new bridges, created the parkway, and took out
many old buildings.
They left the block house.
It was built in 1764 outside the walls of the mighty Fort Pitt.
It's the oldest building in downtown Pittsburgh.
Now on 4th Avenue, there's a classically simple building, Greek revival in style, that's
been a bank, several different restaurants, and even a fountain pen store.
The Burke Building is the second oldest building in town.
The owner, Bill Ferguson, hopes to sell it or lease it, but you can tell he likes this
building a lot.
In the 70s, he decided to restore the original look of the windows, which had been covered.
And when we did that, we found the original indoor shutters nailed into the wall.
And that was one of the most exciting finds.
When we told Pittsburgh History Landmarks, all of them came trooping over and said, oh,
this is great, you know, because they thought we were going to have to design something.
The Burke Building is a handsome historic structure, but it's easy to overlook.
It does offer an unusual view of PPG Plaza, a space that has its critics as well as its
champions.
You either love it or you hate it.
People come in and say, oh, God, is that terrible.
Somebody else says, I just love those buildings in that plaza, you know, in the obelisk, which
has a lot of different names in the area, none of which I want to mention.
Well I'll tell you my favorite name for the obelisk, the Tomb of the Unknown Bowler.
Nice explanation for those four black spheres at the base of the column.
The obelisk is surrounded by six silver glass buildings.
The whole thing is known as PPG Place.
The main building, a 40-story skyscraper with pinnacles on top, a postmodern sort of gothic
tower, has added some zing to the Pittsburgh skyline since the early 1980s.
Vince Sarney, who's chairman of the board and CEO of PPG, was involved in the project from
the start.
We decided that we would make a one-time major contribution to the community.
And so we conceived and developed the PPG Place project.
It's fun to imagine what the company must have thought when they first saw the idea
for this space-age fortress of glass.
I remember very clearly because Philip Johnson, who was the architect, came here after he
received the assignment and he went around the city.
He walked around the city and looked around the city.
And let me tell you that the original sketch he came with is what we finally built.
We made a lot of suggestions and we had a lot of thoughts and we had a lot of views
and he listened to them all very kindly and agreed with a lot of them, but we finally
built exactly what he sketched the first time.
And you know what, I'm glad we did because he knew what he was talking about.
PPG, CNG, 1 Oxford, 5th Avenue Place, they're all part of what's now known as the second
renaissance during the 1980s.
All these new high-rise office complexes mean that more people than ever before work downtown.
There's no mistaking, it's the central business district.
There are places to shop and eat and even to relax, but most people in town these days
are there because they work there.
No matter where you are downtown, there's always somebody on a bike pulling up to or
leaving a building, carrying a package or talking into a walkie-talkie.
Joey Heckman works for the Triangle Messenger Company.
What's up, Big Daddy?
My man.
Once in a while I get scared, just when I see people not using their turn signals or
something just pull out in front of you, you know, or when I see pedestrians in the street
because I don't know which way they're going to go and I'm trying to go the opposite way,
but sometimes, you know, we have had accidents.
I love that part of the job where I can just weave in and out and just, I don't know, it
makes you feel good.
A lot of people think we're dangerous because we're so highly visible, but we're not crazy.
We don't want to die or nothing, but we just like the freedom of being on a bike and that.
Goodski is bursting.
Mark is 275 for a standard life building.
Please proceed.
Call me when it's free.
Clear, John.
If you can ride a bike, you can be a messenger.
You just have to know the basics, the area of downtown and that.
I knew all the stores, Kaufman's, Horne's, Gembell's.
If you know them three, you can basically get around.
Actually, messengers like Joey probably know town better than just about anybody.
They go in and out of the buildings.
They know the best elevators, drinking fountains, the quickest shortcuts and unexpected baked
goods.
In Clark building, they have baked their own muffins fresh right there.
In the Clark building, it's like a mom and pop operation.
Every day they have something new.
They have like coconut macaroons and chocolate chip muffins, five glorious morning muffins,
stuff like that.
And it's always fresh.
John, I'm finished here.
I'm holding one for Bigelow Boulevard.
The Clark building is on Liberty Avenue.
In the morning, the lobby there smells delicious.
Lee Woodward runs the small counter at the back of the lobby, and he's responsible for
the tantalizing aroma.
He says most of it's in the oven, going around in that coffee cup.
That's a secret.
Cinnamon.
Cinnamon water.
Now everybody knows my secret.
This big oven and tiny kitchen mean that Lee has to use every inch of available space.
It's all right here, but it's kind of tight.
You get two or three people working back here.
It gets a little close.
A lot of people like the idea that it's baked in here and knowing that we bake here, we
do pretty good with it.
Lots of students attend classes here, and there are various shops.
But the Clark building is now most famous as the center of Pittsburgh's diamond and
jewelry business.
Some of the jewelry stores have been here since the building opened in 1928, and people
come here to see jewelers.
I smashed my ring.
I'm not happy.
Oh, great.
It's on the frame.
Joe Jagielski sort of manages the Clark building lobby.
He's an information center.
Which elevator comes next?
Where's this?
How do you get from here to there?
Joe came here in the early 60s as an elevator operator.
He remembers when people in the movie industry had many offices here.
Yeah, we used to have a screening room up in the mezzanine.
I used to see the movie before they'd go on.
I'd eat my lunch up there and then watch the movie.
Nowadays Joe hits the sidewalk.
Each time I always walk around town to see what they're knocking down and what they're
putting up and everything.
Because if you don't, you're going to be lost.
Well downtown doesn't change that fast.
In some places only the prices seem to change.
Candy Rama has been selling candy downtown since the 1950s.
There are two shops now on Fifth Avenue.
The newer one is up at the corner of Fifth and Wood by the bus stop.
Marian Pearson's family started Candy Rama.
She says lunchtime is busiest and there's no such thing as a typical customer.
Can I put that in a bag for you?
No.
No bag?
You see businessmen, you see young children, you see every type.
Every older senior citizen, everything.
Everybody loves candy.
Everybody loves our candy.
What do you think of the store honey?
I like it.
You like it?
I like it too because it has a certain timeless quality.
It feels just like it did when I was a kid.
All the shelves and shelves of candy.
All the bins overflowing with goodies.
It's a great reminder too of how much fun it was to come downtown shopping.
Marian remembers.
I used to come downtown every Monday and Thursday with my mother.
Because time has changed over the years.
Time on Monday and Thursday you could not walk down Fifth Avenue in the evenings.
Well downtown was once the only place to go shopping.
Suburban malls have changed that.
But people fondly remember big old department stores.
Rosenbaum's, Frank and Cedars.
Gimbals closed back in September 1986.
People say nobody comes downtown shopping anymore.
But two of the biggies are still around.
Horns was the first department store downtown starting in 1849.
It's been down by the point at Penn and Stanwyck since 1893.
I worked there the summer of 1969.
My first job, third floor.
Kaufman's at the corner of Fifth and Smithfield started on the south side then moved downtown
in 1879.
Kaufman's president, Bill Tobin, says the downtown store is the company's biggest.
That is unusual.
There are not many downtowns that have a really big department store.
And cities the size of Pittsburgh I'd say is quite unique.
It's a big store.
Bigger than any mall.
Kaufman's also has 11 places where you can eat.
When I was a kid my mom would often take us to the TikTok shop.
It's still a very busy place at lunchtime.
What would you like to drink?
Chocolate milk or lemonade?
Chocolate milk.
Okay.
Unlikely as it may seem, the book Road Food, that's mostly about roadside restaurants,
recommends stopping here at the TikTok for the hamburgers, which were found to be excellent
among America's best.
The desserts are pretty special too.
With its counter up front and frantic lunchtime business, it's somewhat like a great old
diner right inside Kaufman's.
It's called the TikTok because Kaufman's has a famous clock outside on the corner.
It's been set for years in Pittsburgh.
I'll meet you under Kaufman's clock.
I mean that's where you met because it was the busiest corner in Pittsburgh.
That's A number one place to be.
The clock is really handsome and recently restored.
They're not sure who designed it, but it's a great piece of Pittsburgh public art.
The two little men on the sides who could do ads for a health club are called telemenes,
an architectural term that means male figures used as pillars.
Probably the best telemenes in town are catty corner from the clock on top of the park building.
These park building guys appear to be holding up the roof.
They've been doing that since 1896.
The park building is now the oldest skyscraper in town.
Pittsburgh is blessed with several excellent early skyscrapers, especially on 4th Avenue.
At 4th and Wood, there's a Pittsburgh national branch in what used to be the People's Savings
Bank.
It's now called the Bank Tower and its raised brick designs are totally random, which was
very unusual and modern for a turn of the century building.
Now Filoni is a partner in an architectural firm that has its offices in the Bank Tower.
Our building is a pretty typical example of what a lot of the old buildings were like
when they were done.
If you can take and look up the facade of the building, you can see that these old buildings
have a base to them that goes up usually above the second floor.
Then there's a whole series of a building that's more simple in the way it's articulated
than the base.
Then you have these wonderful cornices and tops to the buildings.
If we turn and look across the corner at one of the newer buildings done in the late 50s
and 60s, you can see that there's still a base to that building, but nothing else is
articulated.
It's very difficult for a human being to relate to just a big, plain brick wall.
That building happens to be done by a very famous group of architects from New York City
and that's what we were doing in the 60s.
I think now we're coming around to looking at all these bumps that stick out of the surface
of the building and we're beginning to realize that's what we like when we say we're comfortable
with the older architecture.
Inside the Bank Tower, at the back of the lobby, there's a staircase.
The staircase is wonderful.
I think our building is 17 stories tall and it's a half-spiral that's open all the way
from the base of the building to the very top.
You can see the outside of the staircase on the backside of the building, a slender red
tower.
From the Bank Tower's top floor, you can look across Wood Street to the Errett Building,
another early skyscraper.
If you haven't ever looked, the pigeons can tell you.
The Errett Building has the best top.
Look at the top of that building.
You'd have to say today, where's the cost justification in what was done up there?
How many people really ever look way up there to see the top of the building?
But that was done to give scale to this building, to end it in some really grand, wonderful
way.
The Errett Building is grand and wonderful pretty much from top to bottom, starting with
the marble lobby.
Tony Caruso takes care of the Errett.
He knows a building like this deserves special care.
Oh, I love older buildings.
Yeah, I do.
Tony uses the only original elevator left in the building as a maintenance elevator.
From the 18th floor, you have to walk up the last several flights.
Most of my work is here because there's so much old equipment.
And one thing about the guy that I work for, he's interested in restoring and preserving
the history of Pittsburgh.
Up on the roof, you can see part of that ornate topping.
Tony says these things are hollow.
And I would say they weigh maybe 70 to 100 pounds is all they weigh.
They look massive.
And what they're called is gargoyles.
And they have a funny face on the front of them to ward off any evil spirits that might
come into the building.
You know, who to say there's evil spirits and who to say there's not, you know.
The building's lasted 100 years and hasn't fallen apart.
So apparently it's all right.
The Errett Building is more than all right.
It's great.
What really impresses me about it is the decorative ribbon.
I don't know what you call it.
But I figure that is like 500 feet of it.
It had to be in an Italian that put it in there.
And he probably got paid like 50 cents a day for doing it, you know.
And the rest of it's like all marble and terrazzo tile floor and the brass.
I mean, the brass is, you know, I mean, that's what really makes that lobby.
Maintaining one of these old buildings obviously is a lot of work.
But great old buildings seem to make people want to care for them.
Just down the block, there's another skyscraper built in 1905, the Benedham Trees Building.
Paul Robinson is a musician who also helps keep this place in shape.
He deals with the brass here.
Well, the brass is my daily challenge.
I see brass at night in my dreams.
Me and that brass, I'm the only one that does it.
Basically my baby.
Walking into the lobby in the Benedham Trees Building is like stepping into a wedding cake.
It's one of the most unordinary buildings I've ever worked in.
You see a lot of out of town guests coming up the street that stop and look at this building
and then they'll come to the door and I'll have the door locked.
So I sometimes I'll open and let them come in the lobby because I know that they're from out of town.
Paul remembers coming downtown when he was a kid too.
My mom would bring us downtown, me, my brother, my sister, and we'd go shopping, go in all the stores.
And I remember that song, Downtown, by Petitia Clark.
And I used to think when I heard it on the radio, it was pertaining to Pittsburgh.
I just thought that was a, you know, Pittsburgh song.
So every time I heard it, I'd want to come downtown.
Everybody talks about coming downtown and going downtown because few people actually live downtown.
Mike Eversmeyer, who works for Pittsburgh's Department of City Planning,
knows about old sections of town and says that workers used to live downtown right on William Penn Way.
This is the Harvard Yale Princeton Club, which is a club for graduates of those universities.
But originally, these buildings, the buildings on both sides of the courtyard,
were built as houses, six little houses in each one of these buildings.
And you can see the windows in these buildings are clustered in groups of two and there are six of these clusters.
Each one of them was a separate little house.
There's a fancy little fountain in the space between the two buildings.
But what you probably had in the old days, before it was changed into a club,
was you probably had clothes lines hung between the two of them and clothing wash flapping in the breeze.
Of course, in Pittsburgh, it would have been a very dirty breeze.
Well, even though almost everyone who works down here will head out of town when the workday is done,
there are places to stay downtown.
The William Penn is the oldest hotel in the city.
It opened March 9, 1916, with a total of 1,000 guest rooms.
Mary Ann Lee, one of the hotel's sales managers, says a standard room back then cost $2.50 a night.
These rooms were as big as shoe boxes.
And the selling point in 1916, in fact, the most important point, was each room had its own bathroom.
You didn't have to go down the hall.
So we were quite the modern hotel then.
Well, now some of the least modern things about the hotel are the most charming,
like the old ballroom on the 17th floor.
Lisa Berkowitz and Brian Lurie decided to get married here.
You know, when we first started looking at places, we really went all over Pittsburgh,
and we walked into the William Penn, we said, this is it.
Even though it's right in the middle of the city, you could be somewhere in Europe.
It's gorgeous.
The William Penn's Grand Ballroom is an extraordinary space for a celebration,
an elegant and bright place to do something significant.
The William Penn was called the Penn Sheraton from 1956 until 1968.
It's always been a popular place with celebrities.
The pianist in the lobby, Gloria Spiegler, is playing the theme song of Lawrence Welk.
He had several reasons to love this hotel.
He claimed to have gotten his big break here in the late 1930s.
Someone at a Pittsburgh radio station said Welk's music was so bubbly, it was like champagne.
And Welk and his band liked that idea.
Then, 10 years later, one of the hotel's engineers, Ludwig Dernoshuk,
rigged up a crazy little device that made bubbles.
It became Lawrence Welk's first bubble machine.
Well, Welk came back to the hotel in 48, shortly after this machine was invented.
And they put this together with his champagne music makers and history was made.
This is a bread pan, an old clock motor, which they soldered little bubble ones,
which in the 40s were made of metal, as you can see, and a little fan in the back.
Give it a minute.
And there you are.
The construction of the William Penn Hotel was financed by one of the richest men in Pittsburgh's history,
Henry Clay Frick.
He paid for several Pittsburgh buildings, including the one that still bears his name.
20 stories high, built in 1901, the Frick building is simpler and more modern in style
than most of the other early skyscrapers in town.
When this building was erected, Grant Street was 12 feet higher than it is now.
It's somewhat bizarre to imagine, but the city did some major landscaping around 1911
and cut away a big hill that used to be here called the Hump, or Grant's Hill.
The Frick building was one of the structures that had to change to meet the new lower street level.
In the lobby, you can see that there are two floors.
The original lobby is now like a mezzanine.
The bronze lions sit up on the level of the original entrance.
You can still use the beautiful mahogany phone booths here and consult the bust of Henry Clay Frick.
Up on the top floor, there are elegant law offices in what was originally a men's club called the Union Club.
People who work here can step out on the terrace for fresh air and a good look at the city.
Don Long is a legal assistant for this law firm called Myer Dera.
They spent quite a lot of money restoring the 20th floor and some of 19 and 18
because they wanted a building that had some integrity, some dignity, and they wanted to maintain that,
as well as keeping some of Mr. Frick's look.
One floor down on 19, inside Myer Dera, there are remnants of Frick's office and his private bathroom.
This is Henry Clay Frick's shower, stainless steel, and it has many nozzles going around.
And some of the nozzles on the side here read for different parts of the body, spine, liver, soft spray, and a hard spray.
This beautiful piece of furniture opens up and becomes Mr. Frick's commode.
There are many unusual things in the Frick building.
On the ground floor, there's a PNB office called the Potter Branch
because it used to be an office of an old bank called Potter Title and Trust.
That was back when the Frick building was nearly black with soot.
Well, now, across the lobby, this Potter Branch has a safe deposit vault.
If you have a safe deposit box there, you probably know Helen Bartlett,
who is a senior attendant.
Well, we've really been busy today.
What makes this Potter Branch vault truly memorable is the vault door.
Nowadays, you don't see a vault door like this.
You don't see the hand-carved areas that they took the time to do it in those days.
Here, there's patent dates of 1889, 1901, and the design around the doors.
All hand-done. It's beautiful.
I'm real proud of my vault door.
When this armor-plate steel vault was built into the Frick building
for the Union Safe Deposit Company in 1901,
it was then the largest vault of its kind in the world.
Helen always gets a bank officer to help her close up at the end of the day,
but the door is so perfectly balanced that even she can move it.
See, it isn't...
Once it starts to move, she may have some trouble getting it stopped.
Okay.
The door, it weighs around 15 tons, so we're sure nobody will steal it.
Just next door, between the Frick building and the William Penn,
is another Frick project,
the Union Trust building at 2 Mellon Bank Center.
It's the one with the extraordinary Flemish Gothic roof
with two ornate towers on top.
The inside of this building is just as impressive as the outside.
When you see the shops on the ground floor,
you have to imagine that in the center hall here,
there originally was no ceiling until the fourth floor.
It was an open arcade along the corridor from Oliver to Fifth.
You could see four floors of shops.
In the very center, you can still look up to the rotunda on the 10th floor.
They call this central opening a well.
Well, it's spectacular.
And the view down is just as dramatic.
Charles McGaughey, a Mellon Bank vice president,
knows a lot about this building,
including the persistent story, or myth,
that there's a secret chapel or two here.
The St. Paul's Cathedral sat on this site originally.
And myth would have it that when the diocese sold the land to H.C. Frick,
there was a condition in that transfer
which required him to maintain a chapel in this building.
And although that is myth, it still is spoken of today.
And I think it's enhanced by the appearance of these two towers
on the roof of the building, which may look like a chapel to some.
Well, these two towers do look like chapels.
So what's inside?
Right now they house mechanical equipment, ductwork,
and are used as storage.
But up until 1980, 81, they were used as office space.
Pretty cool office space, too.
But modern safety regulations make them unusable as offices now.
Too bad.
The Copper's building is on the corner of Grant and Seventh.
Ed Proudly is a vice president and building manager here.
He knows the way to the top of the building.
And he knows that the green roof here sometimes fools people.
Every once in a while you'll get a call from someone saying,
what denomination is that church at the top of that building?
I normally ask them what denomination they are.
And whatever it is, that's what I tell them it is.
OK.
So why is the roof green?
And what's really in there?
Well, the roof is made of all copper.
And it's oxidized to that color.
Inside the roof is two water tanks.
They're domestic water tanks that feed the upper part of the building
from the 35th floor on down to the 21st floor.
The top floors here are what are called mechanical floors.
A skyscraper usually needs a mechanical floor about every 20 floors.
The equipment can be impressive.
Big motors for the elevators.
All the relays that make the elevators work.
And here, the elevators themselves are pretty good looking.
Built in the late 20s, the Coppers building is what's usually
called an Art Deco skyscraper.
In the early 1990s, they restored the lobby,
taking it back to its original color schemes and jazz age
sophistication.
When the Coppers building was finished,
it was the newest, most modern skyscraper around
and the tallest building in town.
But not for long.
The golf building just across 7th Avenue from Coppers
was completed three years later in 1932.
It was 100 feet taller.
Now officially called the Golf Tower, it's
usually considered another masterpiece of an Art Deco skyscraper.
For nearly 40 years, until the USX Tower was built,
this was the tallest building in town.
And you could go up to the 38th floor to the promenade
to enjoy the view.
Now the business law firm of Humphreys, New Banyan,
and Brialt occupies that floor.
David Humphreys has a corner office
and put some plants out on the ledge.
We have an old brochure of the building.
And it showed plants along all those edges.
So I had some extra plants.
I just put them out there and I thought it was a good idea.
The difference in the air pressure here is really terrific
between outside and inside.
So when I open the door, it makes the ceiling tiles go up
and down and flap.
Sometimes it slams the door.
Bill Baldoff has worked in the golf building
for more than 20 years and is now the building manager.
Out on the promenade, he can show you
where to climb up and peer over to get
a bird's eye view of the home of the golf tower's most
closely watched tenants.
One floor below us, on an offset in the stone,
there's a peregrine falcon nest.
The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy
set up gravel nests on two sides of this building
because people had noticed peregrine falcons flying around.
Peregrines, an endangered species,
like to lay their eggs high up on cliffs.
And for this bird and his mate, the golf building
was enough like a cliff to feel like home.
The golf tower peregrines have been very fertile,
hatching four chicks a year.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission bans the chicks
to identify them.
A pair of peregrine falcons will claim several square miles
as their exclusive territory, and these birds consider
downtown as their domain.
They have a special appreciation for tasty pigeons,
who are wise not to fly too high around downtown.
Even before the birds moved in, the top of the golf building
was famous.
For 16 years, from 1957 till 73, the whole pyramid at the top
was covered with neon tubes that lit up, steady or flashing,
either blue or orange, the official colors of golf oil.
If you knew the weather guide code,
you'd know the weather forecast.
For instance, steady blue meant precipitation
with rising temperatures.
The neon was turned off and torn down during the energy crisis
in the mid-70s.
In 1990, new white lights were installed,
and up at the very top, there's what's called the lantern.
It's a bit of the old forecaster.
Now we're on the 44th floor, and we're inside the weather guide
lantern.
Right now, it's flashing red, which means fair and warmer.
The neon is up on top, but it's the receptionist
on the ground floor who sets the controls.
Pamela Mitchell calls the National Weather Service
and sets the neon upstairs, according
to that official prediction.
That makes perfect sense, but I think
I grew up assuming it was like litmus paper,
and the weather somehow made the building change color chemically
or something.
Now, you don't want to confuse this golf lantern that
predicts the weather with the beacon that flashes
Pittsburgh in Morse code.
The beacon is on top of the Grant building.
This was the largest aerial beacon in the world back in 1929,
when the Grant building was the newest, tallest structure
in town.
It bragged about being one of the largest brick structures
in America.
Mark Lasco has his office about halfway up on the 19th floor.
He's the vice president of the Hillman Company, a Pittsburgh
firm that invests in many businesses.
Mark says the company has some history in the Grant building.
The company has had its headquarters here.
The river is right outside my window for many years.
The company built tow boats and barges
and operated those things on the river,
and the boat captains could go by and blow their whistles
to the manager up in the Grant building.
He could go to the window and see the fleet going by.
River boats used to pull right up on the Mon Wharf downtown.
Transportation has changed a lot.
Pittsburgh was once a railroad hub, too,
with many trains stopping downtown.
The Wabash station was down near the point until the early 50s.
The old Union Station is now called the Pennsylvania.
It's full of condos.
Our architect friend Don Carter has his office
not far from the station.
Now, the Pennsylvania Railroad Station that exists here now
is really one of the three or four best train
stations in the country.
It's very unique because it's the only one that
has a rotunda like you see here.
Imagine driving in here.
I mean, it was built for carriages,
horse-drawn carriages at one time,
and eventually limousine cars and troop carriers.
And all of that happened in this rotunda.
This was the place.
This was the gateway to Pittsburgh.
Essentially, it's the same as the entrance
to Pittsburgh from the airport through the Fort Pitt tunnels.
It's the first thing you see as you come out of the train
station.
You walk under this wonderful rotunda,
and out in front of you is the city of Pittsburgh.
There's Grant Street to that side,
Liberty Avenue to that side.
If you go down Liberty, you'll find yourself
in a different world from Grant Street.
We're standing on Liberty Avenue about one block
from the Pennsylvania station.
And you can see that we're looking
at one of the old hotels that still exist here.
This end of town was always, because the transportation
center was here, the canal and then the train station,
was always a center of hotels, bars, restaurants,
and what some people say is the rough edge of life.
And there's still some remnants of it here now.
There are only remnants of the rough edge
because this part of town is changing.
Much of the area along Liberty and Penn Avenues
has been designated as the cultural district.
Odell Minifield is the supervisor on this job.
We're demolishing the building with a three-story masonry
building, masonry and steel.
We're demolishing it to make way for a sitting part
for the Pittsburgh cultural trust.
It's a tough build, a lot of steel.
They're tearing down what was a porno bookstore and a hotdog
shop.
The cultural trust will put in a small park that will obviously
be more in keeping with the cultural tone
set by the classy performing arts centers nearby.
Lots of people, including Odell Minifield,
remember what used to bring them downtown.
Well, basically going to the theaters.
There were once many theaters downtown.
Entertainment was a big draw.
Priorities got a little mixed up.
And in the early 50s, one old movie house, The Berry,
became a parking lot.
For years, you drove your car under the marquee
to get in or out of the lot.
Now the cultural trust that's redeveloping this district
hopes that the arts will bring people downtown again
for entertainment.
Al Filoni says it seems to be working.
If you come here on a Saturday night
when there happens to be something at the Benidam,
something at Heinz Hall, something at the Fulton,
this is a very, very busy city.
When you talk about the busy city in Pittsburgh,
you have to talk about Market Square.
It's been one of the busiest spots in town
since the earliest days of the city.
It's always one of the best people watching spots around.
Paul Baker used to work in that part of Murphy's that's now
called Market on the Square.
Paul Baker was a baker.
No joke.
He's one of the founders of Jenny Lee Bakery
that moved into this more prominent location
on the square in the late 1980s.
OK, we're going to write on that now for you, OK, dear?
Paul's sons run the business now,
and another generation of the Baker family
is hoping to take over some day.
Paul says when he started Jenny Lee,
Market Square was really busy.
The Market House was out here then.
Donahoo's was next door to Murphy's.
McCann's was down at the corner.
And there was street cars going up and down the street
all the time.
The Market House itself was three stories tall
and filled the whole square here from 1914 until 1961.
It was a huge red brick structure.
There was an archway from one side of Diamond Street
to the other.
And there was an archway on the second floor
that you could walk across.
But on the third floor, there was a roller skating rink.
But a lot of times after work, we'd go over to the oyster house
and have a beer and a fish sandwich.
OK, here we go.
They've been serving beer and fish sandwiches
and breaded oysters at the oyster house
as long as anybody can remember.
Help me, sir.
Can you give me a fish sandwich and a bottle of Budweiser?
OK.
Officially called the original oyster house,
this bar and restaurant and this building
are among the oldest in town.
The Bear Tavern was here before this building.
And the original oyster house has been around since 1870.
Lou Grippo Sr. owns it now.
I bought it in October of 1970.
It was 100 years old when I bought it.
Before that, a man named Louis Americas owned this place.
It died in 1965, but he was a regular at the Miss America
Pagents in Atlantic City.
He was known at that time as Silver Dollar Louis
because he carried a handful of silver dollars
and he played with them all the time.
They were always clinking.
And as a result of his liking the pageant,
he started putting the pictures up.
Louis' long photos of Miss America contestants
are nearly as famous here as the oysters,
which are breaded and fried, delicious and unusual.
They're made by Lou Grippo's Aunt Zeff, Zeffarina Spizzano,
who works in the upstairs kitchen.
She uses only select oysters and a special breading mix.
And then we make the balls and we make sure there's
an oyster in every ball.
Sometimes we have people tell us there wasn't an oyster in there
and it can't be because it's impossible.
And the only thing I can figure out
is they bite into the oyster and they eat the oyster
and then they tell my boss that there is no oyster.
Aunt Zeff sends them downstairs to be fried
and then they're gobbled up by the customers.
Need oysters, please.
Back before the oyster house in the late 1700s,
Market Square was the site of Pittsburgh's first courthouse.
Now Pittsburghers think of Grant Street when you say courthouse
because the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail are here.
This set of big stone buildings is pretty widely acknowledged
as an architectural masterpiece.
Pittsburghers may not pay a lot of attention to these buildings,
but Franklin Toker, who wrote the book Pittsburgh
and Urban Portrait, says they're monumental.
I came to the city and saw this building cold.
Actually, about 15 years before I moved to Pittsburgh,
I wanted to see it.
It was a real significant building
of American architecture.
The city of Pittsburgh has this obsession
about finding its great icon, its Eiffel Tower
or its Big Ben or the Arch of St. Louis.
Pittsburgh really had that marker
and it was this great tower, hundreds of feet high.
It's the protector of Pittsburgh.
This is, after all, the seat of justice in Pittsburgh.
The courthouse and the jail are admired
because they're powerful poetically and practically.
The architect from Boston, Henry Hobson Richardson,
provided all the necessary rooms and offices
while paying homage to historic buildings
and at the same time being modern
and technologically innovative.
The courthouse is a big stone doughnut of a building
with a courtyard in the middle and that tower up front
that was the tallest structure in Pittsburgh
when it was built in the 1880s.
Since 1901, the Frick building has blocked
the tower's view over the city.
The tower isn't open to the public,
but there are old wooden stairs up through the bottom part.
Dave Faust from the county and Tom Jenkins and Bill Schmidt
from Franco, a masonry contractor,
are going up to check out the top of the tower.
At the midpoint, there's an open area
where you can look out between the stone columns.
From there, in the early 1990s, for the first time ever,
you could easily climb up scaffolding
to the very top of the tower.
And the only reason you're here,
that you're able to get up here now
is because of the inspection.
They're making an inspection of the top of the tower.
And after this is inspected, this will all be gone
and you won't be able to get up here anymore.
Not that there's a lot to see.
There's the inspected part of the tower
and the
the inside of the peak of the roof
and a lot of moths and maybe a bat or two.
That looks like a bat.
Hanging on the edge of that brick.
It takes a lot for them to move.
Bill knows that because he's been up there with the bats.
Using ropes like a rock climber,
he pulled himself up to knock a small hole in the roof
for a cable so that he could hang outside
Amazingly, Bill's father had been up there
before Bill was born.
My dad sandblasted it back in 57.
And he told me how he rigged it,
the inside of the tower and how to get out
on the outside of the tower
because there was no scaffolding here when he did it.
And there was no scaffolding here when I did the rigging.
And to get up here was really tough.
The sandblasting in 1957 was to remove soot
from the courthouse and the jail as well.
The jail was also designed by Richardson
and it's connected to the courthouse
by a small stone arch bridge over Ross Street
called the Bridge of Sighs.
It was named for a bridge in Venice
that goes from the palace to the jail.
In Italy, like here, it's thought that a prisoner
on his way to or from court may heave a heavy sigh.
This bridge is simple and beautiful
and it's somewhat of a shame
more people don't get to use it.
The Allegheny County Jail's main entrance
is just below the bridge.
This building and the high stone walls
that surround this block are made of the same
rough cut granite as the courthouse.
Ed Urban is the chief administrator here at the jail.
I think that everyone that steps inside these walls
feels a sense of the architectural value of the building.
It may take the prisoners a couple days
for it to sink in because of the shock
of coming in here first, but I think it settles in.
Ed has studied the history of this remarkable structure.
This cell block in this direction here,
this is the only cell block left
from the Allegheny County Jail's original construction
from 1886, it is the only remaining cell block.
Now the two cell blocks that we have here,
this is the east block and we have the west block,
those were added on in 1912.
The cell block we have over here, the south block,
this is the most recent addition to the jail.
Not far from here, in the part of the jail
that used to be the warden's house,
Ed has an office that's undoubtedly
one of the most interesting offices in the city.
Among other things, he has old photos
of the murderous Biddle brothers and Mrs. Sofel,
the warden's wife here who fell in love with Ed Biddle
and helped him and his brother escape from this jail in 1902.
Ed Urban's office was Mrs. Sofel's bedroom.
Okay, the window just behind me was used
to communicate with Ed Biddle in his cell.
He was in a cell on Murders Row,
which is directly across from that window,
and she would turn the lights out at night
and light a candle and point to different parts
of her anatomy which would indicate different letters
of the alphabet, and they would communicate
back and forth in that way.
When Ed was a kid, he'd either walk
or ride the streetcar into town from Lawrenceville.
And just going, looking at the different buildings,
our favorite places to visit were the morgue,
some of the old department stores.
Wait a minute, the morgue?
Well, at the time, you could walk into the chapel
in the morgue and they had the bodies
that you could look at right through the display case.
They've since closed that part up.
People did come to the morgue.
Jim Greggress, the chief deputy coroner here,
says the most popular time to visit was on prom night.
Guys bring their girls here for a date.
They would be touring Pittsburgh,
and one of the tourist attractions
would have been to go to the morgue.
It used to be that the morgue was open to the public
24 hours a day, seven days a week,
and folks would go into the chapel,
look in the coolers to see if they knew anybody.
The coolers are gone, but part of the chapel's still here.
You would have to go around the back of this building
and climb up a ladder and go over an old storage area
in order to be able to view what is left of the chapel.
The chapel was part of the original morgue,
constructed to look like the courthouse and jail,
because it used to be across the street from them.
That was the original location of the Allegheny County morgue
when it was put into service in 1903.
In 1929, it was moved from that location
to its present location,
which is at the corner of Forth and Ross.
It was moved approximately 290 feet.
What they did basically was jack the building up,
put it on rails, and they used teams of Belgian draft horses
to move the building to its present location.
It took three months, and every day,
people went in and worked in there as it moved.
In a building like this, you can expect surprises.
Well, this is something I found in the basement of the building.
At the time I found it, I didn't know what it was.
And what it is is basically a log of...
..individuals who have been cremated at county expense.
As you notice, there are no names.
I have no idea who they are.
Hmm. They're Pittsburghers.
A long time ago, they came to an unfortunate end.
No names, no details, no stories.
Nobody wants to end up at the morgue, but here we are.
Like so many places downtown, this is an interesting building
with interesting people inside.
The incredible collection of buildings and people and history
on this tiny triangle of land
is what makes Pittsburgh one of the world's great cities.
It's not bad looking either.
And it's practical.
Because, you know, if you're ever lost in the night sky
over southwestern Pennsylvania,
just watch for the beacon on the Grant building.
It can guide you home.
This special WQED trip downtown was made possible by Gateway Center,
managed and leased by Compass Management and Leasing Inc,
a subsidiary of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the US.
By Kaufmans, serving shoppers downtown since 1879,
also now at San Diego's West End,
and by the
San Diego City Council.
The city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's
city's