Renaissance, Phase 2

THE CITY

Some two miles northeast of downtown Pittsburgh lies a stretch of land called Panther Hollow, more colloquially known as "The Gulch." The jagged, 1,000-ft.-wide ravine runs 150 ft. deep and a mile long, an ugly supergully slashing between the green campuses of Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Pittsburgh. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad rumbles along its bottom, flanked by a few slum houses, construction storage yards, truck depots and a junkyard. Most cities would give it up as a desolate though semiserviceable eyesore. Not Pittsburgh, which has announced plans to convert the 75-acre Panther Hollow wasteland into a $250 million research center.

How? By roofing over the ravine, letting its top side serve as a landscaped park bridging the two universities. Subsurface, the project resembles a sort of upside-down layer cake. It will provide some 10 million sq. ft. of usable space to house no fewer than three theaters, an extension of the Carnegie Art Museum, an instrumentation center, and a computer and data bank, all of which will permit research employees to find work, recreation, culture and education within walking distance of one another. The railroad tracks will remain where they are, but they will be spanned by huge arches that will support the whole complex, much as Park Avenue is built above the New York Central Railroad tracks in Manhattan. To provide convenient access for automobiles, the tracks will be paralleled by a highway.

Terraces & Courts. The facilities will be constructed--on as many as seven levels--around sunken courts, terraces and gardens; all interior spaces will be air-conditioned, and circulation between levels will be by elevators, escalators or stairs enclosed in glass kiosks. At the north end, two cantilevered buildings rise to break the otherwise static skyline; at the south end, a series of terraced "hanging gardens" descend from the grade to Panther Hollow Lake, a boating and skating pond below. The whole has been described as a 150-story building "resting on its side."

The project was originated by the University of Pittsburgh's Chancellor Dr. Edward H. Litchfield, who last year founded the Oakland Corp. as a private development company, and enlisted the support of a group of nonprofit city institutions. Fred Smith, who was the prime mover of the massive Prudential Research Center in Boston, was brought in as president and operating head (Litchfield is board chairman), and Architect Max Abramovitz, who designed the Philharmonic Hall in New York's Lincoln Center, was hired.

The research center is just a beginning. The company expects to take a major hand in the implementation of Oakland's new master plan, which calls for the expenditure of $750 million over the next ten years in renovating and improving the surrounding area. The program is being billed as Phase 2 in Pittsburgh's massive Mellon-sponsored "Renaissance," which has already virtually rebuilt the downtown area into the famed Golden Triangle.

Park Out of Nothing. Dr. Litchfield boasts that Panther Hollow Center will be a great improvement over the usual research park, argues that to build comparable research facilities in the conventional manner would require 2,000 acres. "To find this kind of acreage at an acceptable price," he says, "we would be forced to go 20 miles beyond the city. Instead, we in effect have created 75 acres of new usable park area out of nothing, giving us the best-located research facility in the world today. Scientists need--and insist on--close contact with academic institutions and other cultural resources." Of wider significance, city planners all over the nation were taking a second look at their own gulches. For Abramovitz, Panther Hollow demonstrates how an eyesore can be made into an asset.

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