 In many ways, this was the most ambitious project we've undertaken. It's too important to the history of Pittsburgh. It's too important to downtown. It allowed us the opportunity to announce that something very special was happening here. It's a landmark in a city known for enterprise and ingenuity, sweat and muscle. A monument reborn in a city that, for over 200 years, has remade itself time and again. Long before Pittsburgh's reputation was forged by iron and steel, it was a prized frontier outpost on the edge of America's wilderness. It grew following the Revolutionary War into a vital inland trading post and a gateway to the far reaches of the continent. In the early 1800s, Pittsburgh was a key port, with the Ohio River the main waterway moving people and goods from the east to points west and south. It took you straight into the middle of the country and then down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. All these boats that came out of Pittsburgh taking items downriver, there was a continuous loop of goods going south from Pittsburgh. By the mid-1800s, Pittsburgh had evolved into a center for manufacturing and heavy industry. Factories, mills and later blast furnaces crowded the city's river banks, earning it the name the Iron City. Then in 1852, the railroad arrived and commerce and Pittsburgh boomed. During the Civil War, it was known as the Arsenal of the Union, supplying the north with everything from warships and cannons to shot and shells. At the conflict's end, the city was poised for a new era. The river and railways had made it a transportation hub. Iron made it an industrial stronghold. But a new era would soon dawn and transform the world with Pittsburgh as its capital. By the 1870s, Pittsburgh was famous for its iron industry. Then came steel, and a man named Andrew Carnegie. Steel was initially made in the central part of Pennsylvania around Johnstown with the Cambria ironworks, but what Carnegie did was make it huge. Built one of the earliest integrated industries owning both the means of production as well as all the raw materials and the ways of moving the raw materials to the mills. Steel ignited a population explosion in Pittsburgh. Workers would come, often from abroad, lured by jobs that were plentiful, even if conditions were harsh. They advertised in Europe for workers to come and work in the mills. The population boomed from 1880 up to 1900, especially into 1930. The population around Pittsburgh was a million people. The rapid growth strained key public institutions. Among them, Pittsburgh's main post office, which opened in 1891, and was called the finest, most elaborate in the world. But by the 1920s, it was considered obsolete, inadequate, and unsanitary. The city's Chamber of Commerce recommended replacing it. With the help of Pittsburgh financier and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, they selected this site of an old freight depot on Grant Street. It was perfect for building a 10-story, 722,000 square foot facility, bringing nearly 40 agencies into a single complex. The prominent New York architectural firm, Trow Bridge and Livingston, was hired to do the design. They did stylish buildings that were not too never experimental. They were always classically tasteful and powerful. They came to Pittsburgh and they did the gulf building for the Mellon interest. They did the original Mellon Bank in 1924, which they call the Temple of Finance here. The fine materials and the sedate, distinguished design was always a hallmark of the Trow Bridge and Livingston firm. Construction of the $8 million facility began in 1932 during the Depression. On October 13, 1934, Postmaster General James Farley dedicated the massive limestone building. We dedicate this new post office today, trusting it will long remain as a memorial to the historic past. A monument to your present enterprise and a building whose usefulness and beauty will serve the needs and please the eyes of generations to come. It's classical in the sense that it's proportional, it's symmetrical. It has what are suggestions of columns, they're plaster strips. They're stripped down, it's subdued and restrained and yet it suggests all the elements of a classical building. The courthouse has an E shape so that it has open light wells towards the back which would be a necessity in a city as dark and smoky as Pittsburgh in the 30s. The new post office and courthouse building would be a reminder of the strength and stability of the federal government even in the most difficult times. For the next 50 years, the U.S. post office and courthouse building on Grant Street bustled with activity. But in the 1980s, following a downturn in the steel industry, change was in the offing for the building. The Postal Service eventually sold it to the General Services Administration. We acquired the building from the Postal Service in the early 1980s. The agreement included an agreement to allow them to remain in the building rent-free with their local delivery operation and retail operation for 20 years. As the postal presence shrunk, the space requirements of the federal judiciary were growing. GSA decided to undertake a major renovation to meet the court's needs. The cost of the project was estimated at $70 million which is pretty close to where we've come in. And at the time we looked at what the alternative cost of building a new building for the courts would be and the estimates were in the range of $250 million. So it was kind of a no-brainer that this project made sense financially. We knew that it would take a lot of work to bring it up to speed but the idea of abandoning this building never didn't occur to us. This building is too important to the history of Pittsburgh. It's too important to downtown Pittsburgh. It is just too important a building to abandon. The project called for a near total renovation of the building's interior to meet the court's immediate and future needs. Heading the list was improving the building's internal circulation patterns to bolster security. This is a Roosevelt era U.S. Post Office and Courthouse. We didn't think about court security in the 1930s. We didn't have a lot of prisoners in the building. Now we have people here who are walking down the hallways in handcuffs in front of witnesses, in front of jurors, in front of attorneys, in front of newspaper people. So first thing was we wanted to increase the security of the building to make sure that there was separate independent circulation systems for the public, for the judges, and for those in custody. The renovation project was an ambitious one. To design it, the selection committee chose Shalom Baranas Associates, an award-winning Washington, D.C. firm experienced in historic preservation. You know, adding on to an historic building is a little bit like an arranged marriage. That original architect never expected me to be there, and I certainly don't suffer from any surprises from his being there, but nevertheless I didn't choose that. I try to add on to these buildings in a way that makes the New York not only clearly identifiable and separate from the original work, but also in a way that allows you to reinterpret the original building. Baranas' firm inherited a plan that called for building the new courtrooms in the basement track level of the facility, but Baranas proposed an alternative, stacking the courtrooms two per floor inside glass-enclosed additions created in the building's two existing light wells. From a design standpoint, it allowed us to introduce natural light into all of the new courtrooms. Had we placed them at the track level, they essentially would have been buried in the basement of the building. By stacking them vertically, we were able to introduce a small atrium in each one of the courtyards, wrapping around the new courtroom. The committee endorsed the new design. Still, one significant challenge remained. The building was to continue in use during the entire project, with between half to three-quarters of the tenants working on site, meaning it would be business as usual while a full-scale renovation was underway. The renovation of Pittsburgh's post office and courthouse began in the summer of 2002. We realized very early on that there wasn't going to be a single day in the life of this project during construction where the workmen weren't going to be surrounded on six different sides by tenants trying to do their work. It's a very challenging environment. In the historic courtrooms, the woodwork and brass fixtures were cleaned and polished to their original luster. New mechanical and electrical systems were installed, along with updating the audio-visual capacity. One task was, for many, long overdue. There was an acoustical spray-on material that was applied probably sometime in the 70s. It looked like a brown shag rug that was placed on the walls, and what we did as part of this project was to remove that and replace that with acoustical panels that I think were more in keeping with the fabric of the courtroom. The six new courtrooms would incorporate modern technology, expand the physical space for attorneys, defendants, and court officials. In the new courtrooms, we want to bring the same sense of importance, balance, and quiet and judgment into our courtrooms, but using modern design, modern techniques, and modern technology. We have raised access flooring in the courtrooms to allow for communications wiring underneath. We've installed monitors in the jury boxes for the displaying of evidence and other things. We have smart board technology. We have wired attorneys' tables with a lot of touchscreen access. Two types of wood are used inside the new courtrooms to add warmth and visually echo the mahogany in the historic courtrooms. Likewise, the bronze trim evokes the metalwork found throughout the original building in doors, grills, and banisters. Art was commissioned to enliven the new spaces just as bold murals had been integrated into the building originally. The building's south lobby also saw extensive renovation. Not only was it functionally inadequate for a building with size, it presented security risks as well because it's hard to manage the flow of traffic. We took the back wall of the lobby, which has a dedication plaque. We've moved that back about 30 feet. In doing that, we've created a path of circulation for visitors to the courthouse. We've also been able to consolidate a lot of security functions. Along with the improved security screening areas, the entry into the renovated south lobby has been dramatically enhanced. It begins with a tall main entrance vestibule, continues into a two-story gallery, and then finally a single-story space in the elevator lobby. This was all kind of out of the scene. We've kind of brought it into the scene with the expansion of this lobby. As a final touch, the building's exterior was cleaned. With over 70 years of soot and grime removed, a grand building, now a national register-listed historic property, looked new again, a monument reborn. The Pittsburgh Project was in keeping with two other GSA courthouse renovations in the region, in Erie and Scranton, Pennsylvania. In Scranton, they ended up building an entire new building with an atrium as a connector piece. In Erie, they ended up not only utilizing three different historic buildings, but building a new building and connecting all of them together. Totally different from Scranton. And then Pittsburgh was in filling the floor plate in order to preserve the character-defining features of that particular courthouse. I think the renovation was very well done. It doesn't compete with the original building. It has a distinctive design. It's very light and airy, and so you're still able to see the original building from the exterior even, and yet it provides a lot of new space, and the interiors of the spaces are handsome. It met everybody's expectations, and then some. I'm very proud of it, and I think it worked out well. Any time you integrate new space into old space, you want to get some contrast so that you can tell what, in fact, are the historic things in the building versus what's new. And what's new ought to have its own character reflect the time that it's built in. Again, in this particular project, we really think that we achieved that in a really dramatic and very pleasing way.