There’s an illustrated sign mounted above the call button for a bank of three elevators inside the lobby of the City-County Building’s Grant Street entrance. Titled “City-County Elevators,” the sign describes how the bronze elevator doors depict, in bas-relief art, the story of earlier Allegheny County and City of Pittsburgh government offices. Beneath the sign, there’s an empty vitrine blocking access to the historic elevators because they’ve been out of order for a very long time. Even the sign is broken: the word bronze is misspelled.
The City-County Building is where residents get marriage licenses and file wills. It also houses the Pittsburgh City Council, the mayor’s office, the Allegheny County Law Library, and courtrooms. Inoperative and unreliable elevators vex visitors and people who work in the building, especially those who need to access the ninth floor law library and Allegheny County Department of Human Relations.
Half of the elevators in the nine-story building completed in 1917 don’t work. Only two elevators reach that floor on the Grant Street side of the building: one has been out of service for more than a year, and the other frequently breaks down. On the Ross Street side of the building, a bank of three elevators has been out of service for as long as 10 years, according to Pittsburgh Deputy Mayor and Office of Management and Budget Director Jake Pawlak.
The inoperative elevators are a symptom of larger problems the building has with its mechanical systems and management. An agreement signed in 1915 divvies up responsibilities for maintenance and repair between the city and the county. There are inoperative windows, some of them with broken panes held together with duct tape. One court clerk not authorized to speak with the press compares the sound of the air conditioner in their office to the sound made by the steam engine powering the boat in the movie The African Queen.
Pittsburgh City Paper requested a copy of the original intergovernmental agreement. The city declined to provide a copy without completion of a Right-to-Know Law request, which triggered a 30-day waiting period. Allegheny County spokesperson Abigail Gardner said she was unable to get a copy from the County Manager’s office, and she also suggested completing a RTKL request to “trigger a wider search.”
From the outside, the landmark building, which became a City of Pittsburgh historic site in 2020, looks like an architectural gem. Its lobby has been used as a Hollywood filmset, and it’s where the city and county hold receptions and mount exhibits, like this year’s Black History Month celebration.
Just don’t look too closely at the windows and brace yourself for a hike up some stairs if you’re headed down to Grant Street.
Splintered governments and a broken building
Discussions about constructing a joint city hall and county administrative building began in earnest in 1909. In 1912 and 1913, the city and the county executed contracts describing each entity’s obligations in constructing the building, from acquiring the land where it was built to hiring the architect to design it and the contractors to build it. Before construction could begin, then Pa. Gov. Martin Brumbaugh had to sign legislation authorizing the city and county to work jointly in constructing, maintaining, and operating the new building.
“We have shared maintenance responsibilities that are governed by an agreement that’s as old as the building,” Pawlak explains. “It’s been a headache for decades.” City Council records show that the original 1915 agreement has been amended at least once, in 1956.
As the building was nearing completion, some residents suggested that the City-County Building become a model for combining city and county governments. “It stands for union, which means greater force, yet less cost in maintaining it,” Pittsburgh Post editors wrote in 1916. “This building, as pointed out by way of suggesting a remedy, is an attempt to economize in money and convenience by having two of these governments or taxing powers act in concert.”
Several attempts to merge city and county governments have failed since the early 20th century. In 1929, Allegheny County voters rejected a ballot initiative to create a federated City of Pittsburgh. The proposal would have unified all of Allegheny County’s municipalities to cut costs and increase efficiencies to deliver services, according to a 1929 academic analysis.
More recently, in 2008, the RAND Corporation published a report that noted “Allegheny County has the dubious distinction of being among the most fragmented counties in the United States in terms of governmental units.” That fragmentation results in decreased efficiencies countywide and “conflicting, overlapping, or internally inconsistent” policies, according to the RAND study.
Short of consolidating all of Allegheny County’s 130 municipalities, Pennsylvania law allows second-class cities and counties like Pittsburgh and Allegheny County to form joint authorities to manage shared infrastructure, including auditoriums and transit systems, wrote the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in a 1992 report.
The 1956 amendment to the joint city-county agreement covering the City-County Building addressed changes to the Allegheny County Health Department and its shared sixth floor space with the city’s public health agency. The 1956 agreement made Allegheny County “responsible for the maintenance, operation and care of the corridors on the sixth floor.”
The City of Pittsburgh has digitized many City Council records, including ordinances and minute books, which are available online. Contracts related to the City-County Building appear in those records. Allegheny County, which has struggled to preserve and curate its historical records since the 1980s, has no comparable archives.
County spokesperson Gardner said it was challenging to locate accurate information about who was responsible for maintenance and repairs inside the City-County Building. At one point, in response to questions about the building, Gardner emailed, “My understanding is the City is responsible for maintenance in that building.” Gardner corrected her earlier statement after speaking with city officials.
“It is not straightforward,” Gardner wrote.
Democratic Pittsburgh Mayoral nominee Corey O’Connor, whose experiences in the City-County Building date back to his childhood, when his father, Bob O’Connor, served as a city council member and then mayor, says, “there were a lot of stories” about the building’s shortcomings.
“The day of my dad’s swearing in, we came through the back elevators on Ross Street, and we get into the elevator, and there were a lot of us in the elevator trying to get up to the mayor’s office for the swearing-in ceremony,” O’Connor remembers. “The elevator just didn’t even move, and then the doors flung open, and we all got out.”
O’Connor recalls another episode that happened about seven years ago. “I was leaving a council meeting,” he says. “The elevator felt like it was completely dropping, and it bounced up twice, and I was stuck there for a few minutes.”
The presumptive mayor’s recollections and the building’s current conditions underscore an old problem: the county and the city have done a lousy job maintaining the City-County Building. In 1996, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters found broken windows, broken plumbing fixtures, peeling paint, and malfunctioning HVAC systems.
Reporters returned two years later and found little had changed, citing “no public elevators … installed in the northwest corner of the building … graffiti, trash, and broken plumbing fixtures.” A 1998 Post-Gazette headline described the building as a “neglected landmark.”
New furniture, old elevators
In 2023, the City Council budgeted money to repair City-County Building elevators. “We were in the process of assessing what repairs would be necessary and developing a budget for that work,” Pawlak says. City Council allocated money without understanding the scope of the problem, Pawlak explains. “That allocation was not based on any assessment of the condition of the elevators or the amount of funding that they needed. It was simply the amount of money that was in another line item that council was rating. So they picked an arbitrary amount of money and dedicated it to those elevators.”
Funds allocated for elevator repairs in the City-County Building were shifted to buy furniture for the new 412 Boulevard of the Allies building, which houses the city’s Planning Department and other agencies.
Repairing the broken City-County Building elevators is off the table for now, says Pawlak. Instead, there is a plan to replace them.
“I don’t have a timeline for that. The existing elevator mechanisms are very, very old,” says Pawlak. “We’re in the process of working with an elevator company to design and fabricate those elevators and install new systems.”
The City-County Building is a vital part of local government. “This is where we do the city’s municipal business,” says O’Connor. And O’Connor emphasizes that public spaces need to be accessible to all visitors and to people who work in the building.
“Things have to be fixed in a quick manner.”
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2025.
