Articles Archive - Pittsburgh Quarterly

A swirl of flour dust hangs in the air, caught in golden morning light as an artisan baker shapes a baguette. Through the expansive windows of Bread Furst, Washington, D.C.’s beloved neighborhood bakery, passersby pause, mesmerized by the rhythmic ballet of bread making. This is no ordinary bakery. It is the realization of a dream …

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Home & Lifestyle Homes

A View for All Seasons

by Marylynn Uricchio

Pittsburgh is known for many things, but a wealth of contemporary residential architecture is not one of them. That’s especially true in the city’s older neighborhoods, where houses were built to last and still do. Such sturdy stock makes it difficult to find something modern, though one empty-nester couple wasn’t specifically looking for modern. “We …

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Arts

Barebones Gets Its Teeth Into “God of Carnage”

by Stuart Sheppard

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 …

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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? …

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Travel

North Side Museum Shows the Fascinating Evolution of Photography

by Barbara Eichenlaub

“I have discovered photography. now i can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.” These dramatic words by artist Pablo Picasso convey the impact of photography. Imagine how that process, which captures unique moments in time, changed history. The Photo Antiquities Museum of Photographic History, tucked into a tiny second-floor space on East Ohio …

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Nature Travel

First Cruise, Last Continent: A Voyage to Antarctica

by Tracy Certo

There is a language for ice. Tabulas are broad, flat-topped icebergs, and growlers are smaller bergs under three feet tall. Brash ice is a collection of floating discs that form mesmerizing patterns in the water. Then there are the bergy bits, a name that sounds like an offering from a fast-food outlet but denotes chunks …

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Nature

Bird Flu?

by Daryln Brewer Hoffstot

It was near dusk on an evening last spring when I looked out at the chickens from the dining room window. I was checking to see if the flock was heading toward the coop for the night. It’s easier to round them up if they want to retire; if not, they run this way and …

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Obituaries

Soffer, Greer, Reich, Skrinjar, Pitterich, Spatafore, Lubetz, Stancell-Condron Dodd, Bruschi, Pistella, Poppenberg, Poppenberg, Foy, Parsons, Muse, Christie, Aldridge, Rooney, Etzel, Dindak

by PQ Staff

Donald Soffer, 92Soffer was best known for turning 800 acres of swampland into Aventura, Florida, now home to luxury hotels and high-rises. The Duquesne native and his father co-founded one of Pittsburgh’s largest commercial real estate firms in the early 1960s, joining three other brokers in Don-Mark Realty, the predecessor to Oxford Development. The shopping …

Soffer, Greer, Reich, Skrinjar, Pitterich, Spatafore, Lubetz, Stancell-Condron Dodd, Bruschi, Pistella, Poppenberg, Poppenberg, Foy, Parsons, Muse, Christie, Aldridge, Rooney, Etzel, Dindak Read More »

PQ Poem

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.

Arts

Pittsburgh Opera Delivers a Rapturous “La Bohème”

by Stuart Sheppard

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. …

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Arts

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 …

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Profiles

What Do I Know? Dr. Kathy Humphrey

by Jeff Sewald

I was tenth in a family of 12 children. My mother was a secretary and seamstress. My father was a bricklayer who was in the Army and stationed in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he met my mother. This was at the time of “Jim Crow” and, after my father’s discharge from the service, my parents moved …

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PQ Poem

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 …

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Business Profiles

Doing Business with People

by Steve Breuner

It was a couple summers back, when I was sitting down the third base line at PNC park, that my thirst finally won. I had made it through three toasty innings, but now it was time for a frosty draft beer. As I worked my way from the outfield to home plate, I passed four …

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Nature

Explore Elk County’s Scenic Views, Forests and Streams

by Thomas Saunders

One of the great areas to explore and hike in Pennsylvania is what’s known as the PA Wilds. This beautiful, remote part of north-central Pennsylvania is home to vast forests, magnificent mountain ranges, running streams, and even wide-ranging herds of elk. One wonderful place to visit is a 1,500-acre property protected last year by the …

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Arts Education

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

by Stuart Sheppard

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 …

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Profiles

Building Basic Science in Pittsburgh

by Douglas Heuck

On the occasion of the retirement of Dr. Arthur Levine from the University of Pittsburgh, we asked him about his career and what he sees ahead for Pitt and UPMC. For the second half of the 31 years he spent at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he was scientific director of the National Institute of …

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Education

A Different Model

by Carolyn Sanford

When life-long friends Anthony Williams and Brent Jernigan were college interns at a summer school program for Pittsburgh youngsters, little did they know that they would become the future leaders of the program and its parent organization, The Neighborhood Academy (TNA). Since 2001, TNA has been successfully breaking the cycle of generational poverty through education …

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PQ Poem

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 …

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Opinion Pittsburgh Tomorrow

A Turning Point

by Douglas Heuck

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 …

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PQ Poem

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 …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods History Homes

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 …

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