Articles Archive - Page 119 of 147 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

In June I bowed to the demands of my three college-aged children and got the whole family smart phones. As I waited in line at the AT&T store, a guy behind me suggested I should get the “Siri” iPhone. “You can ask it anything, and it answers,” he said. Perhaps I should do that, I …

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Profiles

Foundation of Steel

by Evan Pattak

How entrepreneurial is Jim Bouchard? Consider this: When he sold Esmark, Inc., the publicly held steel company he ran, to Russia’s OAO Severstal in 2008, the price was a whopping $775 million, a remarkable exit for a five-year-old company. But instead of cashing in his chips and retiring to the good life, Bouchard took the …

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Books

Creepy creatures!

by Sandra Levis

Given the prevalence of vampires and werewolves in contemporary culture, one wonders why it has taken so long for them to reach the Pittsburgh area. (We’re a world-class city, dammit!) With typically gray skies and an abundance of abandoned steelworks and subterranean coal mines, our region possesses a strong Gothic quality that ought to be …

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Homes

A Peaceable Kingdom

by Marylynn Uricchio

A flock of picturesque suffolk sheep graze in the verdant pastures, and a bit farther down the long, empty road, a herd of Red Angus cattle stands lazily in the hot sun. Miles of split-rail fencing continues once you turn onto a drive that meanders uphill. Here there are horses, as if placed by a …

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History

The Watery Part of the World

by Jay Stevens

The standing watch was sent below for wet- weather gear, and the clattering of their feet on the ladder awakened me. I headed above deck, blinking in the light and trying to align the fair skies behind us and the gentle roll of two-foot waves with the urgency of the crew laying out the line—called …

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Arrivals

Winkenwerder, Driscoll, Prewitt, Poll, Cohn, Magee, Martino

by PQ Staff

Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. is president and CEO of Highmark Inc., America’s eighth largest health insurer. He comes to Pittsburgh from Alexandria, Va., where he was chairman and CEO of The Winkenwerder Company, a healthcare consulting firm. From 2001 to 2007 he was assistant secretary of defense for health affairs with the U.S. Deptartment of …

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Region

The Young People Myth

by Jeffery Fraser

In the not-too-distant past, Border Guard Bob was thought to have been a good idea. He was the amusing face of a short-lived marketing campaign to staunch the flow of Pittsburgh’s young to other cities, a problem perceived by some of the region’s civic-minded to be grave enough to warrant aggressive action. Bob, a fictitious …

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Leadership

All Hands On Deck

by Bette McDevitt

Opening the lecture series named in his honor, Community College of Allegheny County graduate Robert Mill described labor-management relations in western Pennsylvania as “a regional asset, as much as the zoo and the ball parks. We are the first out of the recession because our community relationships are so exquisite.” Titled “Industry Trades and Skills,” …

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Business

The Future of the Marcellus Shale

by Seamus McGraw

After eight years of unprecedented expansion, the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania is now weighed down by its own success, analysts say. Struggling with a market that is being flooded with more natural gas than it can bear, the industry is optimistically predicting that new markets in transportation, home heating, chemical manufacturing and other industries …

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Innovation

Quantum Couple

by Tom Imerito

He grew up in Manhattan; she, in Patna, India. Both were taken with the way physics accounts for the world around them. After completing undergraduate studies at Harvard and the Indian Technology Institute, respectively, they met as first-year physics doctoral students at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Upon arrival she found herself the sole …

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Food & Wine

The Box is Back

by Alex Sebastian

This was the first good sign: When I asked a group of friends to join me for a tasting of boxed wines, everyone thought it would be fun to participate. No “Ugh, boxed wines!” No questioning of my sanity. Once upon a time, these friends—wine aficionados all—would have been right to turn up their noses. …

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Birds

Final flight: Lessons of the Passenger Pigeon

by David Liebmann

During our colonial period, America’s forests were felled slowly. Beginning in New England, subsistence farming and the promise of better lands to the west meant regions were settled and cleared for agriculture, then abandoned, only to regenerate. This pattern cycle of destruction and reforestation created a patchwork of fields that gave way to second growth …

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Science

Ancient Dig

by Tom Imerito

Twelve thousand years ago, a Native American hunter left a flint spear point at a campsite beneath an overhanging rock along Cross Creek, a tributary of the Ohio River some 29 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. The three-inch by one-inch point was a re-sharpened remnant of a larger spear or arrow head. But the wear and …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

Downtown!

by Tim Fisher

I moved to Pittsburgh with my wife, Audrey, on May 1, 1972 when I accepted a job with The Hillman Company. We moved here from sunny Denver, Colo., and in our first month, it rained 28 days. We thought it was among the dumbest decisions we had ever made, but we’ve lived here the past …

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Arts

Inventing the Modern World

by Graham Shearing

World’s Fairs asks two questions of themselves: “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?” Sometimes they look backwards as well, perhaps a little wistfully. They also fall into the category of jamboree, a 19th-century slang word of American origin indicating a noisy assembly of people and things for a variety of purposes. Usually they …

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Obituaries

Last Chapter: Fall ’12

by PQ Staff

Paul R. Jenkins, 80 As the former leader of the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, Jenkins was a key regional leader who spurred numerous improvements in Greater Pittsburgh and West Virginia for more than 40 years. A Pittsburgh native who received an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from the University of Michigan, he …

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Nature

Hardwood Trails, Bedford County

by Thomas Saunders

One of my favorite places to hike and explore is a property not far to the east of the Laurel Highlands. Driving east along the Pennsylvania Turnpike just past Somerset takes you across the eastern continental divide into the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where the Laurel Highlands give way to the Ridge and Valley area. This …

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Opinion

Stocks & Pedestal, Fall 2012

by PQ Staff

Early four years ago, businessman and philanthropist Henry Hillman called Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon with an idea. With the wealth of information technology experts at CMU, why not apply some of that brainpower to regional transportation issues? Improving transportation-related technology could improve the lives of regional residents, build Pittsburgh’s reputation as a “knowledge” …

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Health

Insurance innovations

by Kelly Casey

Ask someone about their health insurance plan and you wouldn’t expect to hear, “I’m having a great experience.” Health insurance is expensive and difficult to understand. And in the Pittsburgh region, many have, not surprisingly, grown tired of the very public battle between the area’s largest insurer and largest provider—Highmark and UPMC. But this very …

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Special Reports

2012 Pittsburgh Regional Quality of Life Survey

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

In order to understand where we are going, we must first understand where we are. In that spirit, we are pleased to release a distillation of the findings of the Pittsburgh Regional Quality of Life Survey, the most extensive survey of the residents of Greater Pittsburgh since the historic Pittsburgh Survey was published in 1908. …

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Environment

A World Leader

by Justin Hopper

Sitting in the bright, airy café at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Richard Piacentini stamps his foot on the floor. The tiles he thuds against are simple white squares. However, that hardly noticed floor has proven to be both bane and catalyst to a sea change in thinking about every aspect of Phipps’s operations. In …

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Environment

Was Rachel Carson Right?

by Sean D. Hamill

Patricia DeMarco, Director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University, has heard the question before. Has history—and science—proven that Springdale, Pa., native Rachel Carson was right in her book, “Silent Spring”? Not just about the most celebrated of her attacks—the impact on the environment of the widely used herbicide DDT—but the other big-picture points …

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