Articles Archive - Pittsburgh Quarterly

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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Home & Lifestyle Homes

The Feminine Mystique

by Marylynn Uricchio

Not every client gives an interior designer carte blanche and a generous budget to create the home of their dreams. In fact, it’s a rare client indeed who displays that level of trust and assurance. But Amanda Walton asked Alisha Gwen to do just that, beginning with the plans for her new home being built …

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Birds

Black-Throated Green Warbler

by David Liebmann

The dinosaurs have returned! Birds are, by dint of evolution, a living link to dinosaurs. To remind ourselves of that, we need look no further than the Black-throated Green Warbler, a species that returned to western Pennsylvania in early April from as far south as Venezuela and Columbia and has been nesting and raising young …

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Profiles

What Do I Know? David Holmberg

by Jeff Sewald

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where my father did factory work for General Electric and Westinghouse. My mother was a nurse. We never starved, but we didn’t have a lot. We were just a middle-class, fundamentally stable family. And the expectation in our home always was: If you wanted more, you had to do …

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Travel

Go West (to Cleveland) and Rock the Night Away

by Barbara Eichenlaub

As the Rolling Stones sang, “I know, it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.” In fact, LOTS of people love it. 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which attracts over a half-million visitors annually who come to reminisce, learn and share their love of music with the …

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Money

Steering through Chaotic Markets

by PQ Staff

Editor’s note: We asked a group of leading Pittsburgh-area wealth managers to give their answers to two questions facing investors. Each expert answers one of the questions below. Question 1: The Trump Administration’s often-chaotic tariff policies have caused a significant decline in U.S. stocks. Should investors lighten up on stocks in anticipation of more turmoil, …

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History

75 Years Ago the Renaissance Began

by L.E. McCullough

The official start to Pittsburgh’s long-cherished ambition to become a Most Livable City took place on the grey-skied afternoon of May 18, 1950, and it was noisy. At a shouted signal from Pennsylvania Gov. James Duff, an 1,800-pound wrecking ball slammed into a 103-year-old vacant brick warehouse on Exchange Way between Liberty and Penn avenues …

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Arts

The Time It Takes Between the Takes

by Stuart Sheppard

In his celebrated writing workshop of the early 1990s, editor and literary guru Gordon Lish taught that one of the best ways to create an effective agon is to place divergent characters in a confined space – and let them act on their own volition, without smothering them in authorial intent. And that’s exactly what …

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