May 30, 2003

Pitt Updates a Landmark

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

It was one of the most audacious building decisions in the history of American higher education: In the early 1920s, a University of Pittsburgh chancellor named John G. Bowman scrapped a plan to create a genteel Greek-revival campus on a hillside and instead commissioned a 42-story, neo-Gothic skyscraper that he called the Cathedral of Learning. In a 1925 fund-raising campaign that attracted $9-million, he promised that the building would "tell the epic story of Pittsburgh."

The tower,