Princes Street in Edinburgh—an interesting example of a public garden built over a railroad
Suggestion for the Municipal Building in the Civic Center
The locality in question lies to the east and southeast of the present county buildings. It embraces a bit of low ground occupied by the little Panhandle station and local freight yard, surrounded, except for the county buildings, by vacant lands and cheap buildings at various higher levels, mounting on the east to the commanding ridge that dominates all this part of the city. Through this locality the Forbes and Diamond Street thoroughfare and the South Hills and Sixth Avenue thoroughfare will pass. Fifth Avenue borders it on the north, and Second Avenue on the south. It is flanked on the northwest by the noble and distinguished architecture of the court house and the jail—masterpieces of Richardson, priceless examples of the work of one of the few great artists America has yet produced. To the west a new county building is about to be erected. It is proposed that the central area of low ground, occupied by the railroad, be decked over at about the level of Fifth Avenue, and that a great public square with gardens be laid out thereon somewhat after the manner of the celebrated public gardens built over the railroad at Princes Street, Edinburgh, or, in a much smaller way, at Park Avenue, New York. Below the structure would simply be a first class station and freight sheds of permanent construction, with skylights and ventilators, at suitable locations, piercing a flat roof of adequate strength. The cost of construction would be less than the cost of an equal area of land independently acquired for an open space in connection with a Civic Center in any other locality that could reasonably be considered.
Sketch of the proposed Civic Center for Pittsburgh, looking south. The crossing of tracks in center of foreground is at the present corner of Sixth Avenue and Forbes Street
Retaining wall supporting a local park at Lyons—a suggestion for the bluff between Second Avenue and the new City Hall.
