Articles Archive - Page 136 of 153 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Mary-kay Fiore’s life turned out a little differently than she expected. But it sure has a sweet ending. In 2001, the single mother of three found herself downsized out of a corporate job and facing a crossroads. She had baked for years, as a way to pass the nervous hours until 11 p.m., when her …

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Food & Wine

Aperitif!

by Alex Sebastian

It’s always been a nice break for me to get out of the hot kitchen and spend some time tending bar. And 40 years ago when I started in the restaurant business, making drinks before dinner was easy. A martini, a glass of sherry or an imported aperitif—that was all a sophisticated diner wanted before …

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Profiles

A Friend in Need

by Jeffery Fraser

Eleanor Ott grew up in a family that encouraged her to pursue her passion in life. What that passion was didn’t become clear until after she left her Lawrence, Kan. home as a high school valedictorian with a college scholarship. She discovered it among refugee families from Iraq, Burundi, Somalia and other desperate lands whose …

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Homes

Grand Spaces

by Marylynn Uricchio

From the outside, the Tudor home looks as if it’s always been comfortably nestled on the leafy street in Sewickley. That was important to architect Douglas Devlin, whose challenge was to fit a new residence into an established neighborhood without disturbing the aesthetic. “We weren’t technically in the historic district, but we were on the …

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Arrivals

Meyer, Czarnecki, Neverett, Bolding, Moorman, Mathews, Donnelly

by PQ Staff

Jochen Meyer is president of Flabeg Solar US Corporation, which provides a full product line of high-performance mirrors for concentrating solar power. A native of Germany, he received his master’s in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Munich.He continued his education in business studies at the Fernuniversitaet Hagen while working as an industrial engineer …

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Books

Medicine, Murder and the Mon

by Sandra Levis

Corporate histories commissioned by the client are seldom (read never) impartial, and UPMC’s “Beyond the Bounds” is no exception. Author Mary Brignano lays on the praise in this glossy tribute to UPMC founder Thomas Detre, M.D., and his protégé, current President & CEO Jeffrey Romoff. Their accomplishment—the transformation of a parochial medical center into the …

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Education

Thank You for the Dance

by PQ Staff

Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning last fall, students in Laurie Collier’s and Maureen Kedzuf’s fifth-grade class lined up in escort position at Arlington Accelerated Academy and headed to the gymnasium to dance. They were among the more than 300 fifth-graders from six elementary schools participating in Dancing Classrooms’ inaugural year in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. …

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Opinion

Fallow Ground

by PQ Staff

Do you have children?” a new acquaintance will ask, in a natural effort to prompt conversation. My grip tightens around my wine glass, and for an instant, I glance away. Sometimes, I consider lying. “We have a daughter. She’s starting Oberlin in the fall. We think she’ll major in English.” I imagine her, athletic and …

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Sports

From the catbird seat

by PQ Staff

In mid-November, when daylight dwindles, the sky turns flannel gray and a cold drizzle waterboards Pittsburgh, I flap my old, arthritic wings and fly south to Florida—God’s waiting room. Upon arrival, I encounter nice people who inquire where I am from and, upon learning the answer, chirp brightly, “You must be a Steelers fan!” Good …

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Business

We Have the Power

by Reid R. Frazier

Turn on a light bulb. Run the dishwasher. Boot up the computer. Run a Google search. Somewhere, a turbine spins, a coal-laden barge docks near a power plant, a nuclear reactor harvests the bound-up energy of a uranium atom. Electricity generation leads to the release of harmful emissions and a relentless pursuit to extract more …

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Business

Marcellus Shale: Doing it Right

by Seamus McGraw

Oct. 8, 2009, at the Kearns Well near Brush Run, Washington County: As industrial accidents go, this wasn’t a particularly bad one. A valve on a massive water tank had failed. Designed for the low hydrostatic pressures encountered in the flatlands out west, the valve had been no match for the pressures generated by the …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

Portrait of Penn Avenue

by John Beale

Whether the cultural district or the Strip District, Garfield, Point Breeze or Wilkinsburg, Pittsburghers know Penn Avenue as the heart of every neighborhood that grew up along it. Photographer John Beale, also a professor of photojournalism at Penn State University, has spent a year capturing images of life along Penn, and a portion of that …

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Opinion

Coming Home

by Douglas Heuck

My mother would busily get the house ready. One of my jobs was to check the colored Christmas lights on the white pine that towered over our white frame house. We left the lights in all year. The tree kept growing, so every December I would add extra strands as far up as I could …

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Opinion

Cure Alzheimer’s Fund & Our State Leaders

by PQ Staff

Long involved in charitable giving, East End residents Jacqui and Jeff Morby wanted to do more. They wanted to affect the lives of others for the better. So five years ago, they created the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund. It’s estimated that Alzheimer’s care currently costs about $120 billion a year, or some 15 percent of the …

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Birds

Behold the Crow

by David Liebmann

On winter afternoons, thin inky streaks flow across Pittsburgh skies. They follow invisible channels leading over leafless hillsides, empty schoolyards and ice-strewn rivers. They drift, break apart and reconstitute, often in the city’s East End in great airborne swirls. They are the crows of Pittsburgh. Crows are common in myths, children’s stories and cartoons. Eating …

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Books

The City Revisited

by Sandra Levis

After a year-long anniversary celebration in 2008 and two national championships and a global summit in 2009, one might think that the city’s appetite for tributes would be pretty well sated. But there is always room for a little something more, particularly when the fare is as lovingly prepared and tastefully presented as Franklin Toker’s …

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Region

Risking Women’s Health

by John G. Craig, Jr.

If I told you that breast cancer kills Pittsburgh women at a higher rate than women in other cities, and that Pittsburgh women die of heart attacks at a higher rate than women in other cities, what would you say? And what if I compounded the negativity by telling you that African American women are …

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Education

I, Teacher

by Chris Allison

Early in Isaac Asimov’s speculative fiction classic “I, Robot,” a little girl named Gloria becomes more attached to a robot named Robbie than to her own parents. Originally wary of Robbie, Gloria’s parents grow to love and respect the tin man after it saves their little munchkin’s life by sweeping her away from the path …

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History

The Short, Happy Life of the WASP ascendancy

by William S. Dietrich II

Once upon a time in America, when the going was good, there emerged what looked like a ruling class. We’ll call it the WASP Ascendancy. Standing for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, WASP was coined by University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (1916–1996). This WASP Ascendancy traces a soft 20th century parabola reaching its apogee in …

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Business

Oxymoron or Opportunity?

by Jeffery Fraser

From Pittsburgh to the hills of West Virginia, a small army of scientists is racing to tame the billions of tons of carbon vented from coal-burning power plants, working with data sets, computer models, cost analyses and other such tools that belie the drama of their high-stakes investigation. Burning coal casts off nasty pollutants, including …

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Retirement

Choose Wisely

by Cristina Rouvalis

For Dee Strunk, it came down to the screened-in porch. She was touring retirement communities when she saw a charming porch in a carriage house at The Woodlands at St. Barnabus, and she knew this was it. The porch reminded her of the one she loved at her old house in McCandless. “It’s my own …

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Profiles

Word Brains

by Steve Hecht

No two games of Scrabble are ever the same. But when the Pittsburgh Scrabble Club convenes on Wednesday nights, there’s a scene that replays itself over and over again. “Someone will show up for the first time and say ‘I’m here because nobody in my family wants to play me. They’re all tired of me …

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