The Oliver Building

As the Henry W. Oliver building was completed in terra cotta and granite in 1910, columnist M.E. Gable described the scene: “As you make the turn dipping into the throbbing heart of Pittsburgh, the upper reaches of the building burst upon your vision in all their beauty of architectural triumph. As you get nearer to it and contemplate it in its simple grandeur, its magnificent proportions and its dignified solidity, it seems to typify the character of its founder, to whose memory it must stand for all time as [a] well deserved monument.”

The man whose vision it was to build such an edifice — industrialist Henry William Oliver — never saw the building. He died in February of 1904, at age 64, six years before the skyscraper that bears his name was built.

The Oliver Building became what was “the newest, most modernly equipped and one of the largest office buildings in the world.” More than a century has passed and Pittsburgh is emblazoned with the names of its industrialists — Mellon, Frick, Heinz and Carnegie. One among them, “Harry” Oliver, the slender, gallant gentleman in a silk high-hat, remains largely unknown.
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Oliver’s father, also named Henry, had been a saddlemaker and an outspoken defender of property rights in Belfast, Ireland. In the summer of 1842, facing a bleak future, he liquidated his assets, packed his belongings and immigrated to America with his wife Margaret and their four children. They settled on Pittsburgh’s North Side — then known as Allegheny — near a family named Carnegie. Oliver’s father opened a saddlery and young Henry, known as Harry, worked as a telegraph messenger like Andrew Carnegie. He became friends with Carnegie’s brother, Tom.

According to the Oliver family’s biography, Iron Pioneer: Henry W. Oliver 1840 to 1904 by Henry Oliver Evans (1942, Dutton), Harry Oliver was a happy, thoughtful and consistent young man. After studying his father’s craftsmanship and trade — he cultivated a lifelong love of horses — and learning from his brothers by making wagon nuts and bolts, Harry Oliver began his distinguished career in earnest.

He became politically active after listening to President Lincoln address a crowd in the rain on Valentine’s Day. Following the battle of Gettysburg, he volunteered for the Union Army. Later, he met and married wavy-haired Edith Cassidy, “a beautiful girl, slender, with fine features,” and they moved in with her parents in a neighborhood then known as Minersville. They later had a daughter, also named Edith.

Harry Oliver started his own business, planning and developing land and water transportation routes. He went from making vehicle wires and parts to forging iron and steel railroad cars before starting a coal company and purchasing Downtown property. Oliver traded with the greatest American industrialists of the era — Frick, Schwab, Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon and Carnegie. His approach was simple. He contracted concise terms and conditions and he honored agreements. He opposed Pittsburgh’s rising property taxes as an impediment to progress. And he was on good terms with his workers.

Oliver’s career climax came when, during attendance at a Republican National Convention, he learned of the discovery of vast deposits of iron ore in Minnesota’s mountains that could be extracted by steam shovel. He started a company to mine the high-grade ore for his Bessemer furnaces, and, as Stefan Lorant wrote in Pittsburgh: A Story of An American City, “His work marks the beginning of the great Mesabi ore traffic to Pittsburgh steel mills.” In 1901, Oliver joined with Carnegie, selling his holdings for $17 million.
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While vacationing in Africa on a train to Cairo, Oliver met architect Daniel Burnham, who designed skyscrapers in Chicago, Washington, D.C.’s Union Station and Manhattan’s Flatiron Building. Burnham impressed Oliver during the Nile River rail journey and Oliver hired him to design one of Pittsburgh’s first skyscrapers. Burnham proposed widening what was known as Virgin Alley (previously a burial ground for those defending Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War) and connecting three wings for a stately, 25-story building in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Had he lived, Oliver likely would have named the structure the William Pitt Building. He wanted it to evoke Pittsburgh’s industrialism and commercialism and at the same time represent majesty, beauty and elegance. When the project got underway after Oliver’s death, his heirs (who included his brother, George) decided instead that the building should bear “the name of the man whose foresight and business genius had made it possible.”

Excavation went 42 feet below the sidewalk. Four large caissons were sunk 73 feet and filled with concrete on the side adjoining the Trinity Episcopal Church’s property, according to the Gazette. Workmen began setting the steel and putting the frame together on April 1, 1909. Burnham built the first few stories in pink granite, with every story up from there glazed by Pittsburgh Plate Glass in pinkish terra cotta. Two 50-ton granite columns anchor the primary entrance. The lobby is made of marble trimmed with mahogany from Honduras. Every office in the Oliver Building is an outside room, exposing each office to daylight.

Besides harnessing light, every room has a closet, toilet and safe. The building includes ventilation pump rooms, a locker room for janitors, bank vaults, large, multipurpose rooms and 30 tons of brass pipe plumbing. Hot and cold water are first pumped to the roof of the building, then distributed through various pipes to plumbing on each floor. Other features include fresh air pumped through water spray and a pressure-reducing valve. Baseboard electrical, telephone and telegraph wires afforded each office fast connections to lighting, telephones and telegraphs — contained within 12,000 tons of Carnegie Steel. The women’s restroom was staffed with a maid, medical nurse or attendant. Other amenities included a men’s barbershop. Everything is finished in marble.

Delivery and construction of the steel frame proceeded without a single delay. Constructing the Oliver Building employed over 900 men for 20 months. Materials included 37,000 feet of granite, 25 carloads of marble and 80.5 miles of copper wire. Providing its own power, heat, light, water and ice — with a mail chute and offices for bankers, lawyers and “every type of businessman” — the Oliver Building became an instant symbol of Pittsburgh’s place in the Industrial Revolution. The U.S. Weather Bureau occupied the top floor. A weather pole was erected on the roof, topped by a 421-foot electric star powered by 2,200 nominal candle power.

The Oliver Building — the tallest and largest between New York and Chicago — cost $3.5 million ($105 million adjusted for inflation). By the spring of 1910, the Pittsburgh Gazette Times printed a front page article heralding the new Oliver Building as a microcosm realizing Aristotle’s ideal of “the model city.”

Today, the McKnight Company owns the Oliver Building, which is occupied on the upper 10 stories by a Hilton-branded hotel, and it still dwarfs churches while overlooking Mellon Square Park opposite Omni’s landmark William Penn Hotel.

Among the building’s tenants is John Oliver, a U.S. Navy veteran who served as a lieutenant on the USS Saratoga during the Vietnam War and later led the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy for 25 years, becoming the first Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. He is the great-grandson of the man who built the Oliver Building.

Though he has traveled the world and once visited his great-grandfather’s Minnesota iron ore mining lands, John Oliver, like Harry Oliver, spends much of his time in Pittsburgh. “The Oliver family have always had an office in the building,” he said in an interview at his Oliver Building office, adding with a slight shrug, “As far as I know, I’m the last one.”