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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 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.

Retaining wall supporting a local park at Lyons -- a suggestion for the bluff between Second Avenue and the new City Hall

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 it surroundings the one pre-eminent quality of an agreeable sort is the bold picturesqueness of the landscape -- the deep ravines, the lofty hills, the precipitous declivities,

Hillside site of the proposed City Hall

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Last modified on 22-Dec 1999
Design format: copyright 1997-1999 Bruce S. Cridlebaugh
Original document: Frederick Law Olmsted, 1910