Articles Archive - Pittsburgh Quarterly

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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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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People Pittsburgh Immigration Pittsburgh Tomorrow

After Years of Torment in Venezuela, Novelist Finds Refuge in Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum

by Tracy Certo

Israel Centeno is haunted by nightmares of his final years in Venezuela, waking in a lurch of panic as he relives the torment he long endured. The burn of a cigarette jammed against his neck. A baseball bat smashing his car. The beating that broke his fingers. Once he was stabbed with a knife as …

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Education

The Civics of Higher Education

by Gregory Laski

Christina Clark was working online — trying to up her “LinkedIn game” — when she spied a post promoting a new program to recenter the civic mission of higher education. Clark knew immediately she wanted to join the movement, led by New Jersey nonprofit The Institute for Citizens & Scholars [C&S]. It was the spring …

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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 …

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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 …

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American Spirit People Pittsburgh Immigration Pittsburgh Tomorrow

Immigrants are More Likely to Start Businesses — What that Means to Pittsburgh

by Bill Zlatos

In 2000, Johnny Diaz fled the Dominican Republic and the rampant corruption that hampered his business career. If you needed to get something done, he says, you had to bribe someone. He moved to Norwalk, Conn., where he got a job managing a Walmart. In the same town the following year, Grecia Vasquez was studying …

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Arts

Quantum’s “Seagull” Reinvigorates Chekhov

by Stuart Sheppard

Gender-flipping classic roles in theater has become so commonplace that it’s now almost de rigueur. What director wants to go to a hipster cocktail party these days and confess that he or she is casting a white cis male as Hamlet? I’ve seen so many female Julius Caesars that I now expect the play to …

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Obituaries People

Springer, Thorbecke, Sagan, King, Miclot, Wolfley, Tansky, Wholey, Myers, Fagan, Tambellini, Kampmeinert, Hotopp, Truter

by PQ Staff

Cecile Springer, 94Armed with master’s degrees in chemistry and urban and regional planning, Springer was well prepared for a diverse life. A research chemist for Bristol Myers and Schering Pharmaceuticals, she joined Westinghouse Electric as manager of product development for the Advanced Energy Systems Division. From 1978 to 1989, she served as director of Contributions …

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Books History

Rebuilding Pittsburgh — the Story of RIDC

by Steven Alschuler

The first time I visited Pittsburgh for more than a couple of days was Christmas week about 20 years ago. I stayed at the Omni William Penn and the only vivid memory I have is walking around Downtown on a cold Saturday afternoon, not being able to find anyplace good to have lunch. It seems …

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American Spirit Arts Culture

Gorson Bio and an Exhibit at The Westmoreland

by Maxwell King

The first two decades of the 20th century were an extraordinary time for Pittsburgh and for the whole world that bought the steel produced in western Pennsylvania’s mills. The Pittsburgh region dominated the world in the production of steel, and that new alloy utterly changed civilization as the new century advanced. The cars, trucks, rails, bridges, skyscrapers and airplanes that heralded a …

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Nature

On Landscape and Language

by Daryln Brewer Hoffstot

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our western Pennsylvanian landscape and the language we use to describe it — and I found inspiration in a surprising place — a book about the Gaelic language called “Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape,” by Manchan Magan. Magan tells us that there are …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

Ralph Kiner and the FBI

by Bob Fulton

Though he was regarded as one of the most fearsome sluggers in Major League Baseball, Ralph Kiner did step aside once for a “pinch hitter.” An FBI agent. The Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder was the focus of an extortion plot in the summer of 1952. He was instructed in a letter to deliver $6,200 to an …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

There is Crying in Baseball

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

In A League of Their Own, the fictionalized story of the World War II All-American Girls Professional League, Tom Hanks delivers one of the most memorable lines in the history of baseball movies. Playing the foul-mouthed, alcoholic Jimmy Dugan, the manager of the Rockford Peaches, he, at one point, verbally abuses Evelyn, his right fielder, …

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