Rivers of Steel: Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark

Posted on July 16, 2019 by admin

It seems to be a misnomer, “Rivers of Steel,” at least as it applies to the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark, yet that’s part of the official name. The Carrie Blast Furnaces produced pig iron, not steel. The facility, which is just outside Pittsburgh, then sent the iron across the Monongahela River to the vast steel works in Homestead, Pa., site of the 1892 battle between strikers and company goons (professional goons: Pinkertons).

So I’d call it Rivers of Iron. Or maybe Rivers of Molten Iron, which sounds more badass. But never mind, that’s just me picking the sort of nits that allow me to be a half-way decent editor.

We arrived at the Carrie Blast Furnaces in time for the 11 a.m. tour on July 6. The day was blazing hot. Fitting for visiting a place whose heat must have been hellish year-round when it was in operation.

The furnaces were originally built in 1881 and acquired by Andrew Carnegie in 1898, becoming part of U.S. Steel a few years later. They closed in 1978. These days, Allegheny County owns the site and a nonprofit manages it, including tours.

The abandoned pig iron foundry — actually two surviving furnaces along the river, #6 and #7, with the rest razed — is a hulking empire of rust and dust and bricks and voids. Enormous pipes rise into the sky. Twisted metal goes this way and that. Our guide’s constant reminder on pebble paths peppered with debris: watch your step. We watched our step, but when standing still, peered as much as possible into Pittsburgh’s, and America’s, industrial past.

Some soaring elements.

Closer to the ground.

Rusty fixtures.

The king of the complex: one of the blast furnaces.

I listened to the explanations of what certain things were, and how the process moved along, but I don’t have a knack for metallurgy, so most of it didn’t stick. I did get the message about how dangerous and hard the work was, especially in the early days.

The site is also a nexus for graffiti and outsider art. The largest piece of outsider art was created some decades after the foundry was abandoned.

“In 1997, when the furnaces were in the hands of the privately owned Park Corp., a group of local artists entered the site, illegally, with the intention of constructing something from the materials that stayed when industry left: steel tubing, copper ties and wire from electrical conduit,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says.

“Every Sunday for a year, the crew crawled through a hole in the fence, carrying their lunches and a few tools… The artists, whose seven head shots are posted on the exterior of the pump house, fastened the deer’s head on the ground and then lifted it atop the neck using a boat winch.”

Graffitists also roamed the site in its abandoned days. Inside a large shed (where the tour began), the walls are covered with it.

Elsewhere in the complex is a wall on which graffiti is now officially allowed.

“On this wall, it’s art,” the guide said. “Everywhere else, it’s vandalism.”

The Andy Warhol Museum

Posted on July 15, 2019 by admin

The earliest memories I have of Andy Warhol are probably him being mocked by comedians, which I must have internalized somewhat. I didn’t give him much thought in my youth, and if I did, he was the weirdo who painted soup cans and oddly colored portraits of movie stars. Later I regarded his work is stuck in ’60s, as dated as go-go dancing or Hair.

More recently his work has grown on me. Maybe in part because he didn’t stick in the ’60s. That was his heyday, certainly, but half a century later, and more than 30 years after the artist’s death, Warhol is still packing ’em in at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which originally opened in 1994.

But I’ve come to appreciate him for more than enduring popularity. I’m no authority of any kind on his art, but I understand a little about its context now, and see that he was doing new and intriguing things, or sometimes just odd or strange things. Taking his considerable talent as an illustrator in all sorts of curious directions. Making things that are still interesting to look at and think about, which is one of my crude baselines for judging an artist.

Though footsore from a day of tourism, we joined the crowd at the museum on the evening of July 5. The extra Friday hours and half-price admission helped attract us, but we probably would have gone anyway. Pittsburgh has a number of worthwhile fine arts museums, as do a lot of other places. Nowhere else has a museum devoted to Andy Warhol.
Richard Gluckman, who is known for his museum work, redesigned the building to be a museum. Originally built in 1911 as a multistory warehouse, the structure now sports seven floors of galleries and exhibition space, with the permanent Warhol exhibits taking up the top four floors.

Warhol’s early and student work, as well as his time as a commercial artist in the 1950s, takes up the seventh floor. On the sixth floor are ’60s works; the fifth floor features ’70s works; and the fourth floor exhibits works from the ’80s.

In some ways, his early works are the most interesting, simply because they are less familiar. On display on the seventh floor, for instance, are ink drawings of women and produce trucks (1946), “Seven Shoes” (third image down), which Warhol did for a shoe brand in the 1950s, and the risque “Female in Corset and Stockings,” which probably wasn’t for a client.

Equally interesting are items about Warhol’s childhood and youth. Such as a large, blown-up photo of his high school graduation picture. The face is him, and yet not any Warhol you’re used to seeing. Turns out Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh had a childhood and an adolescence, as opposed to the comedian-fodder artist who appeared fully formed in New York with frizzy white hair, painting Brillo boxes.

Also interesting to learn about Warhol: he was the son of Lemko immigrants and he remained a practicing Ruthenian Catholic all his life.

The sixth floor displays the most familiar Warhol output: soup cans and other consumer product-inspired items, celebrity portraits in assorted hues, and clips from his early movies, all 1960s vintage. Most of these are so well known — so absorbed into the tapestry of 21st-century American culture — that I don’t feel the need to link to any images. Even so, I look at the soup cans now and think, interesting idea for 1962. Also, who eats Pepper Pot?

Google Image “soup can” and one of the things high in the results offers a silk screen of “Tomato Soup” for sale. For $500. Not even a limited edition. Presumably the Warhol Foundation is getting a cut. Warhol was an astute businessman as well as an artist, and I think that would make him smile.

All that said, I’m not paying that much for an open-edition silk screen of “Tomato Soup,” however interesting the original concept might have been.

The ’70s and ’80s galleries sported such interesting, or amusing, items such as the “Vote McGovern” (1972) and “Space Fruit: Lemons” (1978). An entire gallery wall featured “Mao Wallpaper,” which he created in 1974 but which the museum reprinted a few years ago, probably to put on the wall. Anyway, it’s there, along with “Skulls” on the same wall (individually, not in a group of six). I like to think that’s a comment on the millions Mao murdered, but I’m not sure the museum would say that.

One gallery display of late-life Warhol output was a complete surprise: computer-generated art. Specifically, Amiga generated.

According to the museum: “In the summer of 1985, Warhol was given his first Amiga 1000 home computer by Commodore International and enthusiastically signed on with the company as a brand ambassador.

“For their launch, Commodore planned a theatrical performance, which featured Warhol onstage at Lincoln Center with rock ’n’ roll icon and lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry. In front of a live audience, Warhol used the new computer software ProPaint to create a portrait of Harry. He later made a series of digital drawings including a Campbell’s soup can, Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus,’ and flowers.”

These images are on display in the gallery, though for most of the past decades, they languished on obsolete Amiga floppy disks. “In 2014, we collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Museum of Art to extract the saved files from Amiga floppy disks held in our archives collection,” the museum notes.

That was something I knew nothing about, since I wasn’t paying attention to Warhol or the Amiga in 1985, though I knew a fellow in my office who still had one of the machines in the mid-90s that he said was still working.

Warhol died in 1987. The Amiga display made me wonder what he would have done on the Internet, had he lived only a few years longer. Probably odd and maybe interesting.

After we left the museum, we walked across what used to be the Seventh Street Bridge, which is mere feet away. In 2005, it was renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge. Dating from the ’20s, it’s a self-anchored suspension bridge that has held up better than the original Silver Bridge, which was of a similar design.

I don’t know how Pittsburghers feel about that name; maybe hardcore Yinzers didn’t take to it. But it’s a fine name for a bridge — goes somehow with the neighboring bridges, named for Roberto Clemente (Sixth St.) and Rachel Carson (Ninth St.) — and I was happy to walk across it.

Point State Park & Pittsburgh Walkabout

Posted on July 14, 2019 by admin

RIP, Patricia Deany, mother of our dear old friend Kevin Deany, and a kind and gracious lady. She passed last week at age 90.

At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers is Point State Park, a 36-acre triangular patch of land that may well be featured in every bit of tourist literature ever published about Pittsburgh since the park’s creation nearly 50 years ago.

But that’s no excuse not walk over to the park from downtown Pittsburgh and make a circuit around the fountain at the tip of the park, which is what we did after lunch at the Oyster House on July 5.
That image makes it look like no one else was there, which wasn’t true at all.
The park offers views of various other parts of Pittsburgh, such as Mt. Washington and the Duquesne Incline.

Or Heinz Field, home of the Steelers. There ought to be a giant ketchup bottle in there somewhere.

Away from the fountain, there’s a view of the Fort Pitt Bridge, which carries I-376 across the Monongahela. It replaced the Point Bridge, which was destroyed, along with the Manchester Bridge, to make way for the park.

Besides being a pleasant green space with views, the park makes various nods to the early history of Pittsburgh. An irregular path of sidewalk follows the outline of Fort Duquesne, the French outpost. Elsewhere other sidewalks mark the outline of the somewhat larger Fort Pitt, the succeeding British outpost, also in the classic star (Bastion) shape.

The U.S. flag is a little unusual. Not in having 13 stars, but in that they aren’t the circular arrangement you usually see. Then again, no one specified how the stars in the canton should be arrayed in those days (and maybe we should go back to that).

On one edge of the park is the Fort Pitt Block House, Point State Park’s only surviving structure from colonial times, built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt. It has endured since then in its original spot, for many years as a residence, more recently as a relic.

Our walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh started at the Block House, led by an energetic young woman, native to Pittsburgh and eager to talk about various places and buildings, though less about design and more about history.

Naturally, the names of Pittsburgh robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick came up a lot, including the story about a dying Carnegie writing a letter to the estranged Frick asking for a meeting, presumably in the spirit of reconciliation.

Les Standiford tells the story, via NPR. A man named Bridge, who delivered the letter, was Carnegie’s assistant.

“Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s ‘Highlands’ up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.

” ‘Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,’ Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.’ ”

Whatever else you can say about the steely-eyed bastard Frick, at least he had no illusions about his benevolence, as Carnegie seemed to have had. Our guide also mentioned the taller Frick building next to Carnegie’s, and in fact pointed them out. They are both now overshadowed by more recent Pittsburgh buildings, of course.

At one point, we passed by a building associated with both Carnegie and Frick, along with a lot of other Gilded Age and later tycoons: the Duquesne Club on Sixth Ave.
Founded in 1873 and still a social club for the wealthy, its current home, a Romanesque structure designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, opened in 1890. Just in time for Carnegie and Frick to discuss, possibly over brandy and cigars, the busting of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Speaking of labor history, not far away from the club, I noticed this historic marker.
The founding convention of the AFL was in a Turner Hall. Our guide didn’t mention that, and I asked her about the Turner Hall. She hadn’t heard it. To be fair, I’d never heard of Turner Halls until recently either. To be extra fair, I’m not guiding walking tours of a major American city, so I consider that a small lapse on her part.

The Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, unlike that in Milwaukee, is no more. The site is now called Mellon Square, a 1950s park-like creation paid for by the Mellons to go with the development of Alcoa’s new headquarters building at that time.

Alcoa isn’t there any more, and the building is now known as the Regional Enterprise Tower, but it still has its distinctive aluminum skin. The New York modernists Harrison & Abramovitz designed it.

I’ve read that a Beaux-Arts palace of a theater, the Nixon, was destroyed to make way for Alcoa, causing some consternation even in the tear-it-down midcentury.

Another historic marker that I noticed (that also wasn’t on the tour).
Why Pittsburgh? I wondered. I looked it up later. NPR again: “Slovak culture is everywhere in the Steel City. It’s home to the Honorary Slovak Consulate, a handful of social clubs, cultural centers and annual holiday festivals dedicated to maintaining and celebrating Slovak traditions.

“ ‘Allegheny County has the highest percentage of all of the counties in the United States, not just Pennsylvania, of people who claim Slovak heritage,’ said Martin Votruba, head of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Slovaks and Czechs formed a group called the Czecho-Slovak National Council of America. Because there were so many Slovak immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Votruba said it seemed like the perfect location to have a big meeting on Memorial Day in 1918.”

Along the way, we looked at a work of public art in Pittsburgh, a 25-foot bronze fountain centerpiece at Agnes R. Katz Plaza by Louise Bourgeois, completed in 1999. The eye-like smaller bronzes are actually benches, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

By the time we got to the U.S. Steel Tower, the tallest building in Pittsburgh, a light rain was falling. It would continue at varying strength through the rest of the walk.

No aluminium for this behemoth, rather steel and lots of it. This too is a Harrison & Abramovitz design. The company made steel for its own building, a newish product at the time, corten or weathering steel, which ends up with a dark brown oxidation over the metal to protect the structure from the elements and obviate the need for paint. (The steel still has many surprising uses.) According to our guide, however, until recently the building skin had an unfortunate habit of spitting granules of this rust onto the sidewalks and people below.

Aluminium, steel and then glass. Fitting for the HQ of PPG, also a stop of the tour. Founded in 1883 as Pittsburgh Plate Glass, these days PPG is a supplier of paints, coatings, optical products and specialty materials.

The complex is actually six buildings, all opening in the early 1980s as part of the effort to revive downtown Pittsburgh. By that time, Johnson/Burgee were the go-to NY architects, so they designed the PPG. Rain prevented me from making a good image, but the tallest of the buildings towers over a plaza that features an ice rink in colder weather. It looks like this on a sunny day.

Toward the end of the tour, we made a stop at a place on Smithfield St. that has no marker of any kind and in fact isn’t distinctive in any way, except for one thing: it was the site of an early nickelodeon, thought to be the first theater anywhere devoted exclusively to movies, as opposed to a live theater with a few machines tucked away to separate patrons from their coins.

“The first exclusive moving pictures theater in Pittsburg and the world was opened in 1905 by Harry Davis and John P. Harris in the Howard Block, west side of Smithfield street, between Diamond and Fifth avenue,” one E. W. Lightner wrote in 1919.

Diamond St. is no longer called that. Oddly enough, the change to Forbes St. was made as late as 1958. I’d imagine that would have been hard to do.

Lightner continues: “Curious to say, the second exclusive picture theater of the world was opened in Warsaw, capital of Poland, by a Pittsburg Polander, who saw the Davis-Harris adventure and recognized the possibilities of presenting so wonderful and profitable a development in his native country.”

“The original and only ‘Nickelodeon’ was opened at 8 o’clock of the morning and the reels were kept continuously revolving until midnight. A human queue was continuously awaiting the ending of a performance and the emptying of chairs. Inside an attendant would announce, ‘show ended,’ and spectators would be hustled gently to the street and new spectators welcomed, seated as quickly as possible, and the picture would again respond to the magic reel.”

As you can see, it was pretty much a nothing site when Google Images came by.

Still looks that way in July 2019. There ought to be a marker there at least, or maybe even a hipster bar with a nickelodeon theme.

The Cathedral of Learning & Its Nationality Rooms

Posted on July 11, 2019 by admin

Pittsburgh has some of the most convoluted street patterns I’ve ever driven through. It’s as if a few grids were thrown at random among the hilly terrain, sort of meeting each other in places, with additional streets — some large, some alley-like — crossing the grids at all angles, plus oddball five- and six-way intersections punctuating things. You know, like Boston, only with more hills.

But also more street signs. And fewer lunatics behind the wheel. At least that was my impression, admittedly based on a small sample, as I figured out how to get from place to place. So driving in Pittsburgh wasn’t actually that bad, certainly better than Boston, despite its initial challenges.

Our car has GPS with spoken instructions. I decided to try it on the first morning in town. Pittsburgh managed to flummox the system early in the game. That is, it was unable to give me directions that I could use in a timely manner. Maybe I misunderstood. Doesn’t matter — I found the system annoying, so I quit using it. I went back to consulting maps.

Still, the system’s misdirection, or my misunderstanding, at one point led us through the Liberty Tunnel. Earlier we’d gone through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Pittsburgh might have some great bridges — more about which later — but it also has some really cool tunnels to drive through.

Our second major destination on the first day was the University of Pittsburgh, which is in the city’s Oakland neighborhood. Besides the Heinz Memorial Chapel, we also wanted to go there to see the Cathedral of Learning, which is a 42-story building. Despite the uncertainties of navigating through the Pittsburgh streets — the GPS voice was silenced by then — I knew I was in the right place when I saw a tall neo-Gothic building rising above everything else around it.

Not that Oakland is lacking for other large structures, just nothing else that tall. In fact the district impressed me as practically a city of its own, with its university buildings, healthcare facilities, sizable apartment buildings, a rich array of retail, some green space and a lot of people out and about. We probably could have spent an entire satisfying day in Oakland.

Even a few blocks away, the Cathedral of Learning makes an impression.

Charles Klauder, the same architect who designed the Heinz Memorial Chapel, did the considerably taller Cathedral as well. Both are Indiana limestone edifices.
Inside are classrooms and administrative offices, but that hardly describes the place. The soaring, four-story lobby could, if anyone wanted to do it, be decked out as a neo-Gothic church.
Something like the Heinz Memorial Chapel. Since the two structures were built at about the same time and designed by the same architect, that’s not much of a surprise.

What really makes the Cathedral of Learning distinctive are its 31 Nationality Rooms, most of which are working classrooms, but each designed to reflect a nationality that had an influence on Pittsburgh’s history.

They’re on the first and third floors. We spent time on the third floor looking at such examples as the Korean Room, based on the 14th-century Myeong-nyundang (Hall of Enlightenment), the main building at the Sungkyunkwan in Seoul.
It was completed only in 2015 by Korean carpenters who built it in that country, took it apart and shipped it to the university, where it was reassembled.

The Japanese Room.
Built in 1999 to evoke residence of an important village leader in a farm village in the mid-18th century in the Kinki district.

The Armenian Room, dating from 1988. Most impressive.
Inspired by the 10th- to 12th-century Sanahin Monastery in Aremenia, which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up.

Also impressive, and probably-not-by-accident on the other side of the building from the Armenian Room, is the Turkish Room, completed in 2012.
In the style of a main room of a 14th-century Turkish house, but also sporting a picture of Ataturk near the entrance (he’s teaching the Turkish nation the Latin alphabet).

My favorite, I think: the Indian Room, completed in 2000. This is the view from the lectern.
A closeup of the columns, decorated with rosettes, swags, and fruit.
The style is a 4th- to 9th-century courtyard from Nalanda University, a Buddhist monastic university. I had to look that up as well.

There might be a lectern, but I can imagine that professors might not spend much time behind it, but rather pace up and down the rose brick floor to more closely converse with the students, who are facing each other.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel

Posted on July 10, 2019 by admin

Chapel has a cozy connotation: little chapel in the woods, wayside chapel, goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t find some sizable edifices that are chapels all the same, such as the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, or the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

Late on Friday morning we arrived on campus to see the sizable chapel, funded by condiment money in the 1930s.
More specifically, the will of ketchup baron Henry Heinz (d. 1919) vaguely provided for the development of a building for religious training and social events at the university. His children and the university administration ultimately decided on a soaring neo-Gothic structure, designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder, who was known for his university work. Apparently the chapel was nondenominational from the get-go.

Looking toward the sanctuary.
Toward the back of the nave. The organ has 4,272 pipes, and when we were in the chapel, an organist was filling the space with soft practice notes.
Both transepts feature dual banks of some astonishingly tall stained glass windows: 73 feet tall, designed by Charles J. Connick’s Boston studio.
I found a pamphlet that tells me that the four tall windows each have a theme: Temperance, Truth, Tolerance and Courage. Some of the characters depicted in those windows are religious figures, as you’d expect, such as the Virgin Mary, Moses, King David, St. Francis, St. George and Joan of Arc.

Others are less expected, such as Sir Isaac Newton. With Edmund Halley down in the corner, helping prove Newton’s laws of motion.
Or President Lincoln.
Or Dorethea Dix.
That’s just a small sample. “The windows, which highlight an equal number of women and men, contain sacred and secular figures from history, literature, and science,” the chapel web site says. There are 391 figures in all.

The Duquesne Incline

Posted on July 9, 2019 by admin

A hundred years ago, hilly Pittsburgh had a lot of operational funiculars: the Castle Shannon Incline, Castle Shannon South Incline, Duquesne Incline, Knoxville Incline, Monongahela Incline, Monongahela Freight Incline, Mount Oliver Incline, Norwood Incline, Penn Incline, and the St. Clair Incline.

Yet others had already come and gone by then: the Bellevue Incline, Clifton Incline, Fort Pitt Incline, H.B. Hays and Brothers Coal Railroad, Nunnery Hill Incline, Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Plane, Ridgewood Incline and the Troy Hill Incline.

That’s enough for a whole chapter of a coffee table book: Great Funiculars of the World, a sequel to Great Elevators of Europe. The designer of most of them was one man, Samuel Diescher, a Hungarian who came to America in 1866 and did an exceptional number of engineering projects during his career.

Only two funiculars survive in 21st-century Pittsburgh, the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela Incline, about a mile apart on the slopes of Mt. Washington, to the south of downtown. We couldn’t come to Pittsburgh and not ride at least one of them, and so on mid-morning of July 5, we drove to the Duquesne’s lower-level parking lot and climbed the stairs on the left for access to the funicular.

The Duquesne, in operation since 1877 and restored in 1963, rises about 400 feet.
Round-trip for ages 12 to 64 is $5, and completely worth it. Though part of Pittsburgh’s transit system, on a quasi-holiday in summer, tourists seemed to be the main customers.
At the top is a splendid view of downtown Pittsburgh and the three rivers and their bridges, though things were a little hazy that morning. No matter.
A few minutes’ walk to the west of the top of the Duquesne is the small Point of View Park. Besides offering roughly the same view of downtown, the view from the park down the Ohio is nice.
The park also features two bronzes in a curiously intimate pose: George Washington and Seneca leader Guyasuta by local artist James A. West (2006).
A nearby plaque says that “this bronze depicts a meeting in October 1770 between [Washington and Guyasuta]… this work captures a moment in time between two formidable men whose actions had a huge impact on Pittsburgh…”

Looking closely at the Wiki entry on Guyasuta, I see this detail about his name: “The many spelling variations include Guyashuta, Guyasoota, Guy-a-soot-er, Guyasootha, Guyasotha, Guyasutha, Kayashota, Kayasota, Kayasutha, Keyashuta, Kiasota, Kiashuta, Kiasutha, Kiosola, Kiyashuta, and Kyasoota.”

Pittsburgh ’19

Posted on July 7, 2019 by admin

Independence Day fell on a Thursday this year, creating a four-day window of opportunity to go somewhere. So late on the afternoon of July 3 we headed east, spending the night near Toledo, Ohio. On the 4th, we drove on to Pittsburgh, where we spent three nights and two full days, returning after an all-day drive today.

We stayed at a hotel in the pleasant Moon Township, Pa., not far from Pittsburgh International Airport. The days were hot and steamy and punctuated by vigorous rainfall in the afternoons — supposedly typical for western Pennsylvania in July, though it was a lot like home this summer. Anyway, even occasional heavy downpours didn’t slow us down much.

The road from metro Chicago to Pittsburgh, if you take the Indiana East-West Toll Road and then the Ohio Turnpike, takes you smack through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We spend a few hours walking its trails on July 4 as a stopover on the way to Pittsburgh.

Getting up early(ish) on July 5, we first went to the Duquesne Incline, one of Pittsburgh’s two funiculars, and rode it up and down. At the top we took in the hazy morning view of the city and the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. My thinking about funiculars: when you find one, ride it. My thinking about the Monongahela: that’s just a damned fun name to say.

Next we drove to the Oakland neighborhood and spent time at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, the Heinz Memorial Chapel — the church that ketchup built — and the Cathedral of Learning and some of its highly artful, internationally themed rooms, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Lunch on the first day was at the the Original Oyster House on Market Square, which is known as Pittsburgh’s oldest bar and restaurant, and which serves up a mighty fine array of seafood. From there we repaired to Point State Park at the meeting of the rivers, site of a French and then British fort in the days before American independence, and the seed of modern Pittsburgh. That’s also where our lengthy guided walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh began, which took up the rest of the afternoon.

That should have been enough for the first day, but our momentum carried us on to the Andy Warhol Museum for a few hours in the early evening, taking advantage of its longer hours on Fridays. A suburban location of Primanti Bros., a local chain, provided a hearty dinner that night.

The second day, July 6, wasn’t quite as busy, but we got around. Late in the morning, we took an extensive tour of Carrie Furnace, a hulk of a former blast furnace complex on the Monongahela. It reminded me greatly of the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, though the scale was even larger. After all, Birmingham was the Pittsburgh of the South, not the other way around.

After lunch in a nondescript but decent Chinese restaurant, we visited the Frick Pittsburgh, whose grounds include his mansion, a museum with his art, a greenhouse, and a carriage and antique auto exhibit. We saw the greenhouse and the auto exhibit.

After treating ourselves to some hipster ice cream late in the afternoon, we went to one more place, despite thunder and rain: Randyland.

It’s the kind of outsider art phantasmagoria beloved by the likes of Roadside America or the Atlas Obscura. For good reason. As Roadside America puts it, the place is a “circus-colored oasis of sunny vibes on Pittsburgh’s formerly grim North Side.”

Phil-Tex Debris

Posted on November 8, 2016 by admin

I did my little part in the 58th quadrennial presidential election this morning — the 10th in which I’ve voted — at about 10:30, figuring that the morning rush would be over. Only one person was ahead of me when I arrived, but about a half-dozen were waiting when I left, so I guess there was ebb and flow throughout the day.

In Illinois, for the record, only four candidates were on the ballot for president: Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Green. Left out: the Reform Party (remember them?); the Constitution Party, who seem to wuv the Constitution, except that pesky establishment clause; America’s Party, a splinter of the Constitution Party, because there are always splinters; the American Solidarity Party, an amalgam of social conservatism and economic redistributism; the Socialist Workers Party; the Communist Party USA; or any number of independents or micro-parties.

Besides Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, I managed to see three other burial grounds during my recent trip, two others in Philly, one in Lampasas, Texas, none of them by design. They all happened to be near places I was going anyway.

Across the street from the U.S. Mint is Christ Church Burial Ground, home to about 1,400 markers on two acres, many dating from Colonial or Revolutionary times. With its irregular stones, worn inscriptions and modern buildings just outside the walls, the place reminded me of King’s Chapel and the Granary Burial Ground in downtown Boston.

Christ Church’s most famed permanent resident is Benjamin Franklin, whose stone was covered with pennies. I overheard a guide say that the cemetery earns a couple of thousand dollars a year picking up the coins left for Dr. Franklin. I like to think he’d be amused by that. A penny saved might be a penny earned, but better for people to give you pennies because they want to.

Another resident I recognized was Benjamin Rush, patriot and man of medicine, in as much as that was possible at the time. His attitude toward bleeding was, alas, about the same as Theodoric of York. Still, he did what he could, especially during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

The burial ground is a few blocks away from Christ Church itself, which presumably needed the expansion space. The church has a smaller cemetery on its grounds, as well as burials inside. It’s a lovely, light-filled Wren sort of church.

Besides its importance as a place of worship for numerous leaders of the Revolution and early Republic, Christ Church was also pivotal in the organization of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. The Most Reverend William White, first presiding bishop of that church, is buried in the church’s chancel. (His house on Walnut St. is part of Independence National Historical Park these days.)

The churchyard is as much garden these days as cemetery.
Lampasas, Texas, is west of Killeen and Temple, and a burg of about 6,600. While driving along US 190 (Plum St.), a main road through town, I spotted Cook Cemetery, established as a pioneer graveyard in the mid-1850s, with its last known burial only in 1873.

In our time, it’s a slice of lightly wooded land between the road and a large parking lot. There are a number of stones, as well as broken stones and fragments, and a few burial sites enclosed by short walls.

A couple of stones include later markers denoting citizens of the Republic of Texas. For instance, this stone’s a little hard to decipher, but one of the dates seems to be November 8, 1855, or 161 years ago exactly. Could be the stone was erected that day, since Rebeca seems to have been born in 1801 and died in ’54.
Enough about cemeteries. Here’s something else I spotted in Philadelphia, at Market and 5th. Another Megabus.
In Dallas, I finally got a decent image of my brother Jay’s dogs, in one of their common poses.

Three More Philly Sites

Posted on November 7, 2016 by admin

One of the things to do while you wait to enter Independence Hall is take a look at the museum of the American Philosophical Society, which stands very near the hall itself.
I wasn’t aware that the APS is still an ongoing thing, but that’s just me being ignorant again. It’s a learned society, originally inspired by the old concept of leisure. “The first drudgery of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1743, “and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.”

The main current exhibit at the APS museum is Gathering Voices, which “tells the story of Jefferson’s effort to collect Native American languages and its legacy at the Society,” says the museum. “Jefferson had an abiding interest in Native American culture and language, while, at the same time, supporting national policies that ultimately threatened the survival of Indigenous peoples. As president of the APS from 1797 to 1814, Jefferson charged the Society with collecting vocabularies and artifacts from Native American nations. Over the next two hundred years, the APS would become a major repository for linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological research on Native American cultures.”

It was an interesting display, including some documents in Jefferson’s hand. The collection isn’t as large as it might have been, however. The museum also tells this little-known story: “When Thomas Jefferson left Washington after two terms as President of the United States, he packed 50 Native American vocabulary lists in a trunk and sent them on a river barge back to Monticello along with the rest of his possessions. Somewhere along the journey, a thief stole the heavy trunk, thinking it was full of treasure. Upon discovering it was only filled with papers, he tossed the seemingly worthless contents into the James River. The loss of the vocabularies represented the destruction of 30 years of collecting on Jefferson’s part.”

Photocopying. That’s what Jefferson needed, but didn’t have.

In the West Wing of Independence Hall, there’s a small exhibit that doesn’t require waiting or a ticket to enter — another thing you can do while waiting to get into the rest of the hall. The exhibit is called Great Essentials.

On display are original printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. All very interesting, but the thing that really got my attention was the Syng inkstand. A fine work of silversmithing, and highly placed in the history of the United States. It may be the only inkstand anywhere that has a proper name, though I wouldn’t swear to it.

“Irish-born Philip Syng was the son of Philip Syng, a silversmith,” notes the Penn University Archives and Records Center. “In 1714 he and his father emigrated to America. In 1726, after a successful apprenticeship in Philadelphia and a trip to England, Philip established himself as a silversmith in Philadelphia. In 1730 he married Elizabeth Warner; together they had at least eighteen children.

“Perhaps on his trip to England, and if not, soon thereafter, Syng met Benjamin Franklin. The two formed a friendship, leading to Syng’s inclusion in the Junto, Franklin’s group of political and intellectual civic leaders… Syng was also elected to various public offices including city assessor, warden of the port, and treasurer of the city and county of Philadelphia.

“Syng was renowned as a silversmith, creating the finest work for Philadelphia’s leading families. His most famous work was the inkstand he made for the Pennsylvania Assembly, which was then used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. He provided seals for the Library Company, the Union Fire Company, the Philadelphia Contributionship and for various surveyors and Pennsylvania counties. His shop produced not only silver bowls, tankards, teapots and trays but also gold belt buckles, buttons and teaspoons.”

A block north of Independence Hall is a visitors center of fairly recent vintage, at least compared with the original buildings, and across Market St. from the center — between it and the Liberty Bell — is the President’s House Site.

I quote the NPS on the history of the site at some length, because it’s a relatively unknown place, but much happened there. It was originally built in 1767, and was known as the Masters-Penn house (a grandson of William Penn lived there in its early days).

“In September 1777, British forces under General Sir William Howe occupy Philadelphia after the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown. General Howe makes the Masters-Penn house his winter residence and headquarters while Washington and his troops retreat to Valley Forge. In June 1778, the British evacuate Philadelphia and consolidate their forces in New York.

“Colonial forces enter Philadelphia under the command of Major-General Benedict Arnold. Arnold promptly makes the Masters-Penn House his residence and headquarters. In March 1779, Arnold resigns his post and two months later, while still living in the house, he begins his treasonous correspondence with the British.

“In January 1780, the house is severely damaged by fire, and is subsequently purchased and rebuilt by Robert Morris, the famed ‘Financier of the Revolution.’ Morris rebuilds the house to its original plan, enlarges the property, and adds an icehouse and several back buildings.

“In 1790, Robert Morris volunteers his house to serve as President Washington’s residence while Philadelphia temporarily serves as the nation’s capital. Washington occupies the property from November 1790 to March 1797, during which time his household includes nine enslaved Africans brought up from Mount Vernon. He also makes several enlargements and modifications to the house and back buildings, including the addition of a slave quarters between the kitchen and stables.

John Adams succeeds Washington as President and moves into the President’s House in March 1797. Adams leaves Philadelphia in 1800 and moves into the newly completed White House in Washington D.C. on November 1.”

So it’s a house associated with the Penn family, Gen. Howe, Benedict Arnold, Robert Morris, George Washington and John Adams. What happened to it later?

“In 1832, the building is demolished and rebuilt as a series of three narrow stores. Only the east and west walls of the original house are left standing, and are incorporated into the later commercial buildings… In 1935, the later commercial properties are themselves demolished, although remnants of the original east and west walls of the President’s House survive until the early 1950s. In 1951, the entire block is razed.”

What’s standing there now is a monument, completed in 2010 after much agitation, to the slaves who came with George Washington to attend his household while he lived there. (And whom he rotated back and forth to Virginia to avoid having to free them under Pennsylvania law.)

“Dominating the site as a whole is a large glass enclosure — the architects, Kelly/Maiello Architects & Planners, call it a ‘glass vitrine’ — protecting the fruits of a 2007 archaeological excavation. Within, about 10 feet below street level, visitors can see the remains of house foundations, revealing both the world of Washington and Adams (who held no slaves), and the world of indentured servants and Washington’s black chattel.”

For the record, Moll, Christopher Sheels, Hercules, his son Richmond, Oney Judge, her brother Austin, Giles, Paris, and Joe were the slaves who worked for President Washington at the Philadelphia household.

Of Hercules, the president’s chef, Wiki notes that “Stephen Decatur Jr.’s book Private Affairs of George Washington (1933) stated that Hercules escaped to freedom from Philadelphia in March 1797, at the end of Washington’s presidency… In November 2009, Mary V. Thompson, research specialist at Mount Vernon, discovered that Hercules’s escape to freedom was from Mount Vernon, and that it occurred on February 22, 1797 – Washington’s 65th birthday…

“At Martha Washington’s request, the three executors of Washington’s Estate freed her late husband’s slaves on January 1, 1801. It is possible that Hercules did not know he had been manumitted, and legally was no longer a fugitive.

“In a December 15, 1801 letter, Martha Washington indicated that she had learned that Hercules, by then legally free, was living in New York City. Nothing more is known of his whereabouts or life in freedom.”

The Second Bank of the United States & The Faces Within

Posted on November 6, 2016 by admin

Unusually warm these last few days. Today was so pleasant I cooked brats outside and we ate them outside for lunch. More leaves are gone than not, so for the moment there’s a mismatch between temperature and foliage, for this part of the country. It’s certain not to last.

The Second Bank of the United States is at 420 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia, just two blocks from Independence Hall. The gallery was as sparsely visited on October 22, a Saturday, as Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell were overrun by visitors. It’s the bank that President Jackson famously slew with a veto of its re-chartering in the summer of 1832, an act that was the focus of the election that fall — which Jackson won resoundingly.

The building is a handsome, bank-as-Greek temple sort of structure designed by William Strickland. Him again. I hadn’t realized he was so prominent in Philadelphia, since I’ve long associated him with Nashville. These days, the building is known as the Portrait Gallery in the Second Bank of the United States, displaying many portraits of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary luminaries.

That includes a large collection of paintings by Charles Willson Peale, whom I didn’t appreciate until looking at one portrait of his after another. The man had some serious talent for portraiture, and much else besides.

I spent time especially with lesser-known figures of the period, though I didn’t see Button Gwinnett. The nation may have just heard of that Declaration signer from Georgia, but I did a report on him in the 8th grade, when we had to do reports on signers (picked at random, I think). I remember him, because his name is hard to forget.

All of the portrait examples from the Second Bank of the United States posted here were painted by Peale. The Founding Fathers are always worthwhile to ponder, but a lot of other interesting people characterized the period. David Rittenhouse, for instance.

Talk about a lesser-known man of the Enlightenment. Of special interest to me is that he was a skilled astronomer — one of those worldwide who observed the Transit of Venus in 1769 — and first director of the U.S. Mint. Not only that, he built swell orreries and surveyed borders for mid-Atlantic states, including the half-circle border between Pennsylvania and Delaware.

“His scientific thinking and experimentation earned Rittenhouse considerable intellectual prestige in America and in Europe,” says the Penn University Archives & Records Center. “He built his own observatory at his father’s farm in Norriton, outside of Philadelphia. Rittenhouse maintained detailed records of his observations and published a number of important works on astronomy, including a paper putting forth his solution for locating the place of a planet in its orbit.

“He was a leader in the scientific community’s observance of the transit of Venus in 1769, which won him broad acclaim. He also sought to solve mathematical problems, publishing his first mathematical paper in 1792, an effort to determine the period of a pendulum. He also experimented with magnetism and electricity.”

Here’s John Dickinson, who didn’t support the Declaration. Later, though, he did his part for independence, and was a delegate in 1787.

“On July 1, 1776, as his colleagues in the Continental Congress prepared to declare independence from Britain, Dickinson offered a resounding dissent,” says HistoryNet.

“Deathly pale and thin as a rail, the celebrated Pennsylvania Farmer chided his fellow delegates for daring to ‘brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.’ He argued that France and Spain might be tempted to attack rather than support an independent American nation.

“He also noted that many differences among the colonies had yet to be resolved and could lead to civil war. When Congress adopted a nearly unanimous resolution the next day to sever ties with Britain, Dickinson abstained from the vote, knowing full well that he had delivered ‘the finishing Blow to my once too great, and my Integrity considered, now too diminish’d Popularity.’ ”

Here’s a nice dramatization of that moment from John Adams, with Dickinson portrayed by Zeljko Ivanek.

This is Thayendanegea, also known as Joseph Brant, a Mohawk war chief who was decidedly not on the side of the colonists during the Revolution.

He was pro-British in the war, in that it served the interests of the Iroquois Confederation. Awfully even-handed of the gallery to include him, though it’s good to acknowledge his leadership skills, which apparently were many in war and diplomacy.

“The Mohawks chose to support the British because American colonists were already overrunning their lands,” says Upper Canada History. “The alliance was not unnatural as far as the Natives were concerned. For more than a hundred years, the Iroquois League had allied itself with the British in their long conflict with the Algonquins. Brant, Mohawk chief, had fought alongside the British in the Seven Years’ War and he remained loyal to the redcoats. This new alliance was really just a continuance of their long-standing cooperation…

“Brant fought with fierce determination against the Americans on the frontier and distinguished himself as one of their most courageous warriors and ablest strategists. His contribution to the cause did not go unrewarded. Of Brant’s loyalty and leadership, Lord Germain wrote, ‘The astounding activity of Joseph Brant’s enterprises and the important consequences with which they have attended give him a claim to every mark of our regard.’ In 1779 Brant received a commission signed by the king as ‘captain of the Northern Confederate Indians’ in appreciation of his ‘astonishing activity and success’ in the king’s service. Even though he esteemed his rank as captain, he preferred to fight as a war chief.”

After the Americans won the war, Thayendanegea led his people to Canada, with mixed results. He’s regarded highly enough in Canada to have been on a proof silver dollar in 2007, the bicentennial of his death.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: Pennsylvania