Culture Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

No News is Bad News Read More »

Within a day of the Jan. 7 news that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will close on May 3, I began receiving emails suggesting I create a group to save the paper or start a replacement. Why? Because I worked at The Pittsburgh Press and Post-Gazette for 20 years as an investigative reporter and business editor, and …

History Sports

Heavyweight Champion John L. Sullivan’s Wild Bouts in McKeesport and Allegheny City

by Clayton Trutor

“The air of Pittsburgh has been thicker today than at any time since the discovery and general use of natural gas,” intoned an unnamed editorialist for the Pittsburgh Post on September 19, 1886. “But not as in the old time with smoke however but with pugilism.” On the previous evening, heavyweight boxing champion John L. …

Heavyweight Champion John L. Sullivan’s Wild Bouts in McKeesport and Allegheny City Read More »

History Sports

Steelers Cheerleaders?

by Bob Fulton

Dedicated students of Steelers history are likely aware that Pittsburgh was the first NFL team to feature cheerleaders. The Steelerettes, composed of co-eds from what was then Robert Morris Junior College, were active from 1961 to 1969. But mention the Ingots — the Steelerettes’ male counterparts — to any Pittsburgh fan and the response is …

Steelers Cheerleaders? Read More »

Opinion

20 Years of Pittsburgh Quarterly

20 Years of Pittsburgh Quarterly Read More »

In 2005, I left my job as business editor at the Post-Gazette to start this magazine. After 20 years at the Pittsburgh Press and PG, I could see the newspaper industry’s future. It was time for a change. I considered moving to another city — a growing city — and visited several. I thought of …

Opinion Pittsburgh Tomorrow

Pittsburgh Tomorrow

Pittsburgh Tomorrow Read More »

With Pittsburgh Tomorrow turning two years old, a citizen might ask: What is it and what is it doing? I publish this magazine, and I also started Pittsburgh Tomorrow, working with a great team to improve this region’s future. Pittsburgh Tomorrow is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) non-profit funded by Pittsburgh citizens — wealthy people and working …

Barebones Gets Its Teeth Into “God of Carnage”

Barebones Gets Its Teeth Into “God of Carnage” Read More »

The living room has always been one of the most dangerous places in America, because it’s a space that brings people into close contact, allows them to share their feelings, and usually happens to be where the alcohol is stored. As we’ve learned from plays such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and “Long Day’s …

Education Opinion

AI and the Academy

by PQ Staff

Editor’s note: We asked our region’s college presidents to answer one of the following questions: How is AI affecting your educational approach, and what unusual challenges and opportunities does it present? How much and in what ways are restrictions on international students affecting your institution, and what are you doing to adapt to these changes? …

AI and the Academy Read More »

The Morning Commute

by Torli Bush

The Morning Commute Low slate clouds make the morningsun into a trick moonjust above the tree linewhile the fog makes I-79into a ghost trail, a liminal fadeof asphalt and other vehicles:now in sight, now out of sight.The split deer carcasses along the edge,the covenant sacrificethat feeds this machine.

Pittsburgh Opera Delivers a Rapturous “La Bohème”

Pittsburgh Opera Delivers a Rapturous “La Bohème” Read More »

We tend to view “bohemia” through a hagiographic lens, but its inception, as depicted by the French writer Henri Murger in a series of vignettes entitled Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851), was hardly romantic. The first bohemians were poor, often living in squalid conditions, and suffered morbid degradations in physical as well as mental terms. …

Art is a Conversation, Not a Lecture Read More »

Art is a Conversation, Not a Lecture

by Patrick Fisher

We read Stuart Sheppard’s recent piece for Pittsburgh Quarterly, “Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves?” with interest, and a fair amount of disagreement. Centering on Kara Walker’s recent exhibition at the Frick, which featured annotations from a select group of Pittsburgh-based guest labelists alongside the artwork, the article raises questions …

Elegy for the Appalachian Summers of My Childhood Read More »

Elegy for the Appalachian Summers of My Childhood

by Bethany Jarmul

Elegy for the Appalachian Summers of My Childhood For the smell of honeysuckle & the itch of poison ivy,for the sun-baked sweat stains on the armpits of our tank tops. For the bumpy toads that blinked at us as we clutched them& the slimy ones that slipped from our fingers. For the July fourth festival …

Arts Education

Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves?

Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves? Read More »

Imagine if before the performance of a play, the director stepped on stage and told the audience what it was supposed to think about it. Viewers would be insulted. Or perhaps laugh. Some might even walk out. Yet this kind of didactic inculcation is quite normal in museums today. In fact, because the exhibitive experience …

Opinion Pittsburgh Tomorrow

Living Grief

by Donna Dzurilla

How am I supposed to do this? Your rough hands cup my shouldersyou hold me a step away then kiss me.I know every assaultworking steel made to your body.Pockmarks on the top of your hands from scalds of wet metalFlesh underyour right forearm puckered by a slice ofsheet metalInner left thigh a leathery map of …

Living Grief Read More »

A Turning Point

A Turning Point Read More »

It’s rare to be able to witness first-hand the alchemy of change that launches a city onto a new trajectory. Yet in Pittsburgh that change — a series of man-made lightning strikes — is underway. Since May 20, not even three months from this writing, events have turned in favor of those working to create a …

Architecture & Neighborhoods History Homes

Nightrain

by Jennifer Hambrick

Nightrain after Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days We missed the sunsetand now we are lying in this bedthe lights offeverything closed in darknessmarking the death of dayof wakefulness, obscuringthe colors of the world. I notice the rain tendering the leaves—dropping sometimes in needleslight and slender, sometimeslike paint splotching a tarp, rotund,worldly. Drops fall in disheveled timetaps …

Nightrain Read More »

Gilded Not Golden

by Aakanksha Agarwal

By noon, the sky should have been bright. Instead, smoke turned it the color of tarnished brass. The smoke pressed into brick, clung to the damp wool of work shirts, and settled deeply into the lungs of the men leaving the mills. Many were immigrants, drawn by the promise of steady wages. Instead, they found …

Gilded Not Golden Read More »

Opinion

True Courage

by Elizabeth Wiethorn

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”” –Eleanor Roosevelt I have lived through my own private horror. I have looked fear …

True Courage Read More »

Architecture & Neighborhoods Arts Culture

Reimaging a Home

by Vicky A Clark

Steep and narrow Rialto Street, once known as Pig Hill and the route from the Allegheny River to the slaughterhouse, is a piece of Pittsburgh history. At the top of the hill is a new addition to local experience, the art houses of Troy Hill. As contemporary interpretations of historic house museums — Henry Clay …

Reimaging a Home Read More »

Quantum’s “Seagull” Reinvigorates Chekhov