Hillside site of the proposed City Hall
Along the east side of this square or garden, in the form of a gradually rising terrace, would run the approach to the new South Hills bridge ascending gently from Forbes Street; and on the east side of this again, as though terraced on the hillside, would be the principal municipal building culminating in a tower which would spring from the highest level at Bluff Street, where the playground of the Holy Ghost College could be utilized as a park. The group enclosing the square would be completed by another building at the north with frontage on Forbes Street, Fifth Avenue, and Sixth Avenue, and by a low building on the south serving to screen the factories and freight yards south of Second Avenue but leaving open the view of the opposite hills. The plan and the sketch perspectives indicate in a general way the sort of architectural development for which the situation appears to call. The pronounced and unsymmetrical differences in elevation, the slanting grade of the approach to the great South Hills bridge, the irregular and picturesque form of the site and of the existing county buildings, all seem to demand a certain informality and picturesqueness of design. These peculiarities of the site ought to be welcomed because they are eminently characteristic of the city and of the mountainous region in which it is set. Throughout the city and its surroundings the one preëminent quality of an agreeable sort is the bold picturesqueness of the landscape—the deep ravines, the lofty hills, the precipitous declivities, the plunging prospects from hilltops into the river valleys—and a similar quality of forcefulness, activity, and bold, irregular adaptation of means to ends, is to be felt in all the more dominant and impressive works of man in the city—the steel works, the bridges and viaducts, the jagged sky-line of office buildings. To build a City Hall and Civic Center of scholastic formality, appropriate in the placid surroundings of Paris, would be to lose a great esthetic opportunity.
The Cathedral Terrace at Bern; a suggestion for utilizing a high situation for public buildings and grounds
The hillside of Ofen at Budapest, an interesting treatment of the slope crowned by a public building
Diamond Street Widening
It would be difficult to overestimate the value, to the future convenience prosperity and business efficiency of the city, of carrying the Forbes Street improvement straight through to a junction with Liberty Avenue on the line of Diamond Street; and it is deemed a peculiarly fortunate thing that this is the only east and west line in the midst of the business district where a wide street can still be put through without destroying any considerable number of costly modern buildings.