THE ATLASES ON THE PARK BUILDING | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

For more than a century, they have knelt in rows 200 feet above street level, bearing the roof of Pittsburgh’s oldest skyscraper on their shoulders.

This year, two more Atlases will join the team at the Park Building, located Downtown at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street. However, unlike their beefy brethren at the roofline, these giants will take their places on the sidewalk — flanking the entrance to “The Kneeling Man Kitchen,” the landmark building’s new food hall.

Building owner David Bishoff says he hopes adding a pair of recast Atlases will prod people to cast their eyes upward past the unremarkable blocky base of his historical high-rise to appreciate the terracotta splendor adorning its cornice. Opened only a few years before the turn of the 19th century, the structure was erected for David Park, a lesser-known steel mogul from Pittsburgh’s industrial heyday.

“To me, it’s just remarkable that someone would come up with the idea — and they would then cast them, bring them to Pittsburgh and lift them up on the building,” Bishoff says. “They’re purely decorative, but the engineering, the design that it took, we all benefit from that.”

Pioneer New York skyscraper architect George Post, who won a competition to design the Park Building, used similar Atlas figures — sometimes called telemones — in his Manhattan designs. A limestone trio supporting his St. Paul Building on Broadway was so widely admired that when the building was demolished, the figures were saved and given a new home in a park in Indiana (where the rocks they were carved from originated).

Architects through the ages have employed all sorts of unique visual elements to capture the public’s attention and get people to look up and admire their creations. Consider PPG Place, a 1980s Postmodern palace crowned with iconic — and solely cosmetic — spires.

Skyscraper ornamentation was arguably at its most extravagant more than a century ago, when office towers of 10 or more stories represented a radical new technology. Their designers tried to soften the jarring alteration to city streets, taking inspiration from the Classical and Renaissance ages and melding motifs into a pastiche of styles known as Beaux-Arts.

“We have an amazing wealth of historical buildings that are a lot less studied than they should be,” says Francesca Torello, a special faculty member at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture and expert on Beaux-Arts and other styles of the period. “They’re really fascinating, and they represent a moment when Pittsburgh was at the center of the national culture, in part because of money and in part because the architects were some of the best available.”

Besides Post, there was Daniel Burnham of Chicago, who designed New York’s famous Flatiron Building, and who came to Pittsburgh for showy commissions including the Frick and Oliver buildings, also Downtown. The city also boasted its own skillful stable of architects eager to satisfy local capitalists looking to leave their legacies on the growing skyline.

Take Scottish immigrant Thomas Hannah, who settled in Pittsburgh and designed the Keenan Building — now Midtown Towers — for Pittsburgh Press Publisher Thomas Keenan. Its bulbous roof, painted red in a 1970s remodeling, originally gleamed with gold-painted tiles when it opened in 1907 and supported a giant globe and eagle. Back then, the public would have noted its resemblance to two famous domed skyscrapers, one in New York City and another in San Francisco, that were also built for newspaper tycoons.

MIDTOWN TOWERS | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

Or consider the local architects behind a pair of elaborate towers that rose simultaneously in 1901 on either side of Wood Street at Fourth Avenue: the richly detailed Peoples Savings Bank — now the Bank Tower — by Alden & Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s preferred designers, and the Arrott Building — now the Industrialist Hotel — with its striped facade, false balconies, and cornice line of shouting faces by Frederick Osterling.

“It almost seems like there was a competition of who could build the most over-architectured building,” says Izzy Rudolph, president and CEO of McKnight Realty Partners, owners of the Bank Tower.

THE INDUSTRIALIST HOTEL | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

McKnight spent some $7 million on renovation and restoration of the Bank Tower after purchasing it in 2018. Most of the money was for interior remodeling, but one noticeable aspect of the upgrade was a mural of the building’s name added to the rear-facing side, which Rudolph says was inspired by the faded “ghost signs” of structures of the period. The new owners also applied a fresh coat of yellow paint to pick out a shaft next to the mural that is reminiscent of Rapunzel and contains the tower’s main staircase.

“People want to be in buildings that have personalities, and buildings that are historic have a lot more personality than newer buildings,” Rudolph says.

A little more than decade after his work on the Arrott Building, Osterling designed the Union Trust Building on Grant Street for Henry Clay Frick. Urban legend claims the twin “chapels” on its roof were mandated by the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese, which sold Frick the parcel where its cathedral had long stood and relocated in Oakland. In reality, Osterling’s flamboyant Gothic design simply followed a new fashion for office buildings in the 1910s, inspired by the Woolworth Building in Manhattan, then the world’s tallest skyscraper.

THE UNION TRUST BUILDING | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

The 1920s saw the rise of Art Deco, though architects continued to rely on historical themes. The stepped pyramidal top of the Gulf Tower by New York firm Trowbridge & Livingston mimicked the roof of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the legendary Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (and a theme they had already used for a Wall Street skyscraper).

At the pinnacle, a weather beacon signaled the weather using spotlights in Gulf Oil’s orange and blue logo colors. That feature went dark for decades, until 2012, when owners Rugby Realty installed a multicolored LED display with each tiered hue representing an aspect of the forecast: temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind speed. The number of Pittsburghers who can translate the code is admittedly tiny, even among those with a compelling reason to know it.

“My wife will tease me,” says Francisco Escalante, president of Draxxhall Management, which manages the building for Rugby Realty. “Where we live on the North Side, we can see the Gulf Tower looking out the bedroom — and she will jokingly ask me, ‘What is it telling about the weather?’ And I’ll say, ‘I don’t know, it’s an art piece.’ She’s like, ‘What do you mean you don’t know what the lights mean? You put them there!’”

Escalante is much more focused on the roof’s structural condition, which he has been assured is excellent after a thorough inspection by Virginia-based restoration engineer Steve Bentz.

“It’s in amazingly good shape up there,” says Bentz, who has climbed scaffolding and rappelled down the sides of buildings across the country, including the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. “They used very, very thick limestone [on the Gulf Tower]. It’s exceptionally thick compared to other buildings of the same vintage I’ve worked on.”

Exterior restoration work on the Gulf Tower in 2021 mostly consisted of replacing and repointing the mortar joints, Bentz said, since the stone showed little deterioration. He also oversaw the design, inspection and repair of the facade of another Rugby Realty property in Pittsburgh, the Frick Building, after an approximately 1 ton section of granite cornice broke off and fell to the sidewalk in 2017.

Leaks through the 100-year-old copper cornice had resulted in corrosion of the embedded steel anchors that led to the stone cracking. Bentz and his team inspected the anchors on 53 similar stones and installed new stainless-steel anchors to restore the cornice to prevent a repeat occurrence. That job and the Gulf Tower mortar repointing cost Rugby “in the millions,” according to Escalante. “We know that this work needs to happen, we know that we are stewards of these buildings for the next 100 years, and so the money is there for that investment,” he says.

After the Frick incident, the city revised its building code to specify that facade inspections, which are required every five years, could no longer be handled by a contractor and instead had to be done by a Pennsylvania-licensed engineer.

“How something was built at the turn of the last century is not how we would build things today. It’s not necessarily substandard, it’s just different materials, and there are not always clear documents about how it was built,” explains Dave Green, director of the city’s Department of Permits, Licenses and Inspections.

Green’s staff includes more than 60 inspectors and code-enforcement personnel. Since August 2021, the department has cited six Downtown high-rise buildings for exterior facade problems, Green says. In three cases, the city issued criminal complaints against owners after they failed to address the problems; two of those cases were resolved, while the other one awaits a hearing before a city magistrate. Requests to Green and mayoral spokesperson Olga George for specifics about those cases did not receive a response by publication date.

For Bishoff, owner of the Park Building, there’s a simple reason his company’s real-estate portfolio consists mainly of historic skyscrapers in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Cincinnati: “They didn’t cut any corners. They built them to last, and the quality of the workmanship is so far beyond anything that you see today, there’s no comparison. But I will say, they take a lot of patience and capital to keep them standing.”

The investment is worthwhile, in his view.

“These old buildings are the fabric of what makes downtowns live and breathe,” Bishoff says. “If you scrap them they’re gone, but they each have a fascinating story.”

Mark Houser is the author of two books on antique skyscrapers, “MultiStories” and “Highrises Art Deco,” and has spoken to audiences at the Skyscraper Museum in New York, the Chicago Architecture Center and elsewhere. More than 2,000 people have taken his “Antique Skyscraper Rooftop Views” tours in Pittsburgh. The next tours are scheduled for May 10-11; details can be found at his website: housertalks.com.