Pop Star: Frank Toker

The kudos come from every corner. Here's venerable New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wondering, "how do you keep Frank Toker in Pittsburgh?"

And here's Pittsburgh Born, Pittsburgh Bred, the city's official 250th anniversary book, pronouncing that Toker's 1986 Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait is "the region's one indispensable handbook for assessing Pittsburgh's built environment."

Now, as if to top himself, the maestro has re-assessed and rewritten his text.  Pittsburgh: A New Portrait, like its older brother impeccably documented and impressively detailed, is what arts impresario Charlie Humphrey calls "relentlessly optimistic." As a variable, profound, robust city, set in a visually remarkable region, Pittsburgh deserves Toker's encomium.

The story begins in Montreal, where Quebec-born Toker wrote a book on the Notre Dame Cathedral, for which he won a major prize. He was 26 years old and on the map.

Working on excavations on Florence's renowned Santa Maria del Fiore Duomo, in 1974 Toker was offered a two-year contract to teach at Carnegie Mellon. Six years later he moved over to Pitt, where he's been a professor of art and architecture ever since.

As a new Pittsburgher, Toker studied the buildings, toured the neighborhoods. "I've never had anything but a good attitude about Pittsburgh," Toker says today, sitting in his Frick Fine Arts Building office, a room predictably crammed with books and papers. "After I got to see the place," he recalls, "I looked for a book about Pittsburgh."

He found that neither Stephan Lorant's Pittsburgh:The Story of an American City nor the Van Trump/Ziegler Landmark Architecture of Allegheny County were to his taste. Neither, Toker says, "was the living, breathing city."

Being the energetic, prolific Toker, he said to himself, there's a wrong I have to write.

Poking around, photographing, finding artifacts (including the original Courthouse competition drawings, lost for more than a century), he felt "local," Toker says, "connected to the city."

By '86, the book was under his belt. Why do it again?

"It was in the back of my mind," Toker shrugs. "The city had changed so much over 20 years."

In many places, Pittsburgh, world-class at reinventing itself, is unrecognizable from what it was in the mid-'80s – Heinz Field and PNC Park, CAPA High School, the Children's Museum, the Warhol, Children's Hospital, the Convention Center, Washington's Landing; the multiple works of the Parks Conservancy, Riverlife, the Cultural Trust; and so on. "A lot of stuff has come into the city," Toker says.

Taking three summers, 2005-08, Toker re-discovered that "the city is dynamic," he says. "It's freer, less constricted, much decentralized.  A thousand voices are rising -- that's all to the good."

Nothing symbolizes that transformation more than what Toker's cover, The Two Andys, Sarah Zaffiro and Tom Mosser's Smithfield Street mural depicting Carnegie and Warhol under hair dryers getting their nails done.  It's the new Pittsburgh: colorful, cheeky, more diverse.

"We may be post-industrial," Toker says, "even post-heroic, but we get engaged in this city very quickly, its glories and its trials."

To receive Pop City weekly click here.

Abby Mendelson's latest book, End of the Road, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen