Frick Building and Annex

Frick Building and Annex, a photo by sportsedit15224 on Flickr.

Henry Clay Frick was a colossus among titans during the Gilded Age and beyond. Frick initally made his mark by creating a firm that turned Southwestern Pennsylvania coal into coke, a prime ingredient in the steel-making process, which brought him to the attention of steel baron Andrew Carnegie.

Frick became a Carnegie partner and the two made plenty of tax-free profits until the violent Homestead Strike and other frictions ruptured their personal and business relationships permanently. (Years later, Carnegie reportedly requested a face-to-face meeting with Frick, who supposedly told a go-between, "Tell Mr. Carnegie I'll see him in hell.")

Befitting his stature, Frick commissioned Chicago architect Daniel Burnham to create what would become the tallest building in Pittsburgh when it opened in 1902. Frick wanted it to be so tall that it would put the neighboring Carnegie Building in a perpetual shadow.

Upon its opening, the building had 20 floors, including a basement. But when the level of Grant Street was lowered in 1912, a new entrance had to be created in the basement.

Burnham also designed an annex, seen here in the left of the photo, which opened three years later.

In the marble-clad lobby are two bronze lions sculpted by Alexander Proctor and a stained-glass window, "Fortune and Her Wheel," made by John LaFarge [see www.flickr.com/photos/artisticpursuits/2671959980/]

The Frick Building and Annex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Burnham was a skyscraper pioneer who created the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, and supervised the "White City" of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.

For more on Burnham's facinating career, see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham