By MARTY LEVINE

When Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman announced a new skyscraper classroom building at a dinner in the University Club on Nov. 6, 1924, he gave it the name of Cathedral of Learning, but he twice called it the Cathedral of Inspiration.

Bowman’s speech did not lack for lofty ambition or hyperbole. He predicted that the structure would be, metaphorically speaking, “a reach for the unattainable. Such expression requires height — perpendicular lines that run up and up unbroken, ending at an elevation which, as you behold it, sends blood to your fingertips; and at the top there should be no spire, but rather a horizontal sky line, as if to say, ‘We could go still higher, but the supreme wonder and value of life is not in attainment it is in the attaining, in the growth, in the striving to reach the unattainable.’ That is the spirit of achievement.’”

His announcement certainly inspired comment — immediate, strong and widespread. After just five weeks, Pitt claimed it had “more than 2,300 clippings” about the proposed building from newspapers in the 48 United States, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, England, France, Australia and New Zealand, with more than 400 printing Pitt’s artistic rendering of the building.

The local press had been quickest to react, of course. “It was known in confidential circles that the plan, envisioned by Dr. Bowman, had been discussed for several years,” said the Post. “Once finished, the building should take its place in the sphere of beauty, dignity and grace shared only by the greatest cathedral of the world.”

“Alumni declare it will lift Pitt to world leadership in educational ranks,” reported the Press, while the Gazette Times called the Cathedral “one of the largest and most beautiful buildings ever designed” and expected “this stupendous educational project … to help make Pittsburgh the seat of one of the greatest universities in the world.”

Three days later, a wag on the Post’s sports page wrote: “While it has been facetiously remarked that the University of Pittsburgh's prime reason for erecting a 52-story building” — the then-planned height of the Cathedral — “was to afford room on the roof for an uninterrupted view by its football scouts of Carnegie (Tech)'s practice for the annual game with the Panthers, the bold truth of Pitt's effort to have a suitable place for the staging of the game was brought out yesterday to a group of viewers who looked over the mammoth stadium, already far advanced in its construction.”

Yes, Pitt Stadium, proposed three years earlier, was just then underway. “… the bowl at the head of Lothrop Street is already shaping itself. … The city can learn a lesson from the school and both working together make Pittsburgh a real place for real, red-blooded men and women to live in and enjoy it. Pitt has taken its mental and physical development along, hand in hand.”

Bowman promoted the cathedral idea further at a “midwinter pep meeting … the first to be held in many years,” complete with “motion pictures relating to the Cathedral of Learning,” which may have been stirring but were certainly silent; the first talk of “talkies” would only appear in newspapers in the next year.

But the idea got some further pep from Miss Pittsburgh, who soon appeared in an Atlantic City parade on a float, pulled by nine Pittsburghers in Pirates uniforms, with a model of industrial life in the city, including the Cathedral of Learning.

Still, the Cathedral of Learning notion was so controversial in some quarters that the University of Wisconsin debating team took it up as a subject, yea or nay — although no report could be found of the result.

Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser noted that Pitt’s “great ‘Gothic Cathedral,’ which will cost $10,000,000 will rank close to the Woolworth building as the tallest inhabited structure in the world,” but cautioned that the University “seems to have forgotten the plans of Mussolini to build a skyscraper even taller than the Woolworth building” — which was itself labelled the Cathedral of Commerce in its time.

The Des Moines Evening Tribune, reminding readers that Bowman was once head of the University of Iowa (1911-14) but apparently had not yet hit upon such grand plans, grudgingly editorialized: “He is building a school building on the principle of a factory or a business block. That is a new beginning many have been thinking about, as our ornamental school buildings begin to cost so much. President Bowman calls it a ‘cathedral of learning,’ but as anybody can see it will be a big office block devoted to education on lines of space economy. It is to be a 52-story building and will accommodate 12,000 students. ...

“The student will enter this building precisely as he would a big office block. As he has business first on one floor and then on another he will go there as he would in a big office building. There will be the least loss of time and the greatest conservation of energy possible. Even if every other school does not at once copy after this Pittsburgh university plan, at least we shall have the contrasts presented, and the inevitable result will be a greater concentration than we now have at our institutions of learning. We are still possessed with the notion of making a landscaped garden park of our school grounds. It will be well to have an office building of education built merely to show that it will conduce to efficiency and economy.”

A column in the Buffalo News, quoting another unnamed newspaper, noted: “A New York writer sees difficulties in the path of athletics at Pittsburgh's proposed 52-story cathedral of learning. ‘By increasing it to 57 stories,’ he observes, ‘the university might earn an endowment from the pickle millionaire. Having (an) elevator shaft for a campus may be progress but it still doesn't sound like comfort. Their will arise numerous problems. Will freshmen be permitted in express elevators? Will the flag rush on the roof of the 680 foot skyscraper be safe, and how will the spectators watch it unless they go up in airplanes?’”

Many headlines referred to it as the “Scraper University” and joked about “higher education,” but the Rochester Journal was inspired to flights of science fiction: “Pittsburgh University will build a skyscraper … that's the right monument for modern learning. And a good name, ‘The Cathedral Of Learning,’ has been chosen for it. American cities that limit height of buildings, limit also the genius of architects and of builders, a foolish proceeding. The Cathedral of Learning will have 16 high speed elevators and will amaze the land. How small it will seem compared to future buildings, arranged for flying machine accommodation on the roof, elevators starting from the top down instead of from the bottom up. The manufacturing cities of today, with their slums and dark streets, will be replaced by gigantic glass buildings as big as the city, the workers flying to and from their homes on the hilltops 100 or 200 miles away, ‘ten minutes by flying machine.’”

Most impressively, the anonymous editorial writers at the Boston Globe had a fit, first praising the Cathedral of Learning as a “towering dream” that “deserves the applause of the rest of us if for nothing else than its stirring attempt to do something fine and worthy in a new way” — then spent as much ink complaining that no mere building could equal a real cathedral’s dedication to God.

They invoked Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and Beethoven to ask, “When will we stop putting our faith in size, in materials, in quantity, in externals? The skyscraper is, after all, a thing of stone and steel, an instrument, an implement. And the only thing which can give it life or meaning is that unseen but eternal cathedral, the human spirit.” Which, in the end, was exactly Bowman's point.

For more on how Pitt looked in the year when the Cathedral idea was first made public — all five buildings — plus Pitt’s shifting plans, and what the Cathedral site had once held, see https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/pitt-making-original.]

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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