Articles Archive - Page 145 of 152 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

I grew up on what had been an old apple orchard, and fall meant turning the crank of our oak-and-iron cider press. It meant picking up apples from the grass and quickly unhanding those whose undersides had rotted and were crawling with yellowjackets. After a strong rain, it meant the inevitable loss of old trees …

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Opinion

Stocks & Pedestal, Fall 2007

by PQ Staff

In the stocks: Polluted air When we recall Pittsburgh’s old nickname, “The Smoky City,” we think of it as a pejorative description of a dirty, industrial place. But when Pittsburgh first got that appellation, in the still agrarian 19th century, it was a badge of honor. Smoke meant factories, and factories meant progress and wealth. …

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Profiles

The gift of opportunity

by PQ Staff

In October, one of Pittsburgh’s children is coming home and throwing a big party. That child is the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the “party” is a two-day celebration of the most recent winners of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. The biennial event, the Nobel Prize of philanthropy, has honored the titans of the …

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Profiles

Thomas Hales: The Proof of the Proof

by Jennifer Bails

The message went out without fanfare on a quiet summer morning. Thomas Hales finally was done—or so it seemed. Near collapse, he e-mailed his colleagues announcing that he had achieved the impossible. After more than a decade of work, Hales had completed a proof of the Kepler conjecture, a centuries-old conundrum about how best to …

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Profiles

Rich Engler, Music Promoter and Entrepreneur

by Jeff Sewald

I was born in New Kensington, Pa., and grew up in Creighton, across the river. My father was a glass worker at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. My mother worked for the county. I studied art education at Youngstown State, then at Carnegie Mellon. I was also playing in a band and began to see …

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History

Andrew W. Mellon: Building a Banking Empire

by William S. Dietrich II

The year was 1866. With monotonous regularity, an older man and a little boy boarded the train in East Liberty for the short run downtown. The older man, attired in a long-tailed frock coat and a high-starched wing collar, spoke to the boy about matters of consequence; he spoke to him as an adult. The …

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Profiles

His Last Resort

by Mark DeSantis

I don’t want to be mayor of Pittsburgh. I want to change Pittsburgh forever, and I’m convinced the best way to do that is as mayor. There are, however, other ways to make our city better. You could work for an extraordinary politician who cares for this city like no other place on earth. You …

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Arrivals

Saunders, Gibson, Dietz, Perkins, Nollen, Astorga, Dayan, Suver, Wright

by PQ Staff

Thomas D. Saunders is the new president and CEO of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Saunders was most recently in Gainesville, Fla., where he was community development director for the city for the past 10 years, directing planning, growth management, redevelopment, housing, historic preservation and neighborhood planning.Prior to that, he directed the Maryland Environmental Trust, a …

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Obituaries

McCullough, Chiodo, Boesel, Bernard, Moore, Wargo, Hansen, Prosser, Aiken

by PQ Staff

C. Hax McCullough Jr., 81 McCullough was a writer and a great advocate for Pittsburgh. His projects often included supporting the arts, and he wrote histories of the Pittsburgh Symphony, opera in Pittsburgh, West Penn Hospital, The Pittsburgh Golf Club and corporate histories.He had a love for music which began as a youngster in Point …

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Food & Wine

The Pie Place

by Barbara Eichenlaub

It’s a gift to be able to do one thing really well, and The Pie Place in the Norman Centre 2 in Bethel Park has that gift. The little shop is tucked in a strip mall dominated by Borders and Louis Anthony Jewelers. It’s been there for over four years, but many locals have never …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

Song of Greensburg

by Barry Paris

A thousand feet up the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in the beautiful Laurel Highlands lies the city of Greensburg, an hour southeast of downtown Pittsburgh. A major business and cultural center, its 16,000 population doubles during work hours, giving it one of highest daytime-growth rates in the country. You, like Ed McMahon, did …

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Birds

A Flight of Fancy

by Adam Lynch

A casual glance at Tom Erdner’s Gibsonia patio on this fine Sunday wouldn’t reveal anything unusual. But there are a few clues. For instance, on the table where he’s sitting, there’s a pen, note pad, watch, calculator and cell phone.Then there’s the serious look on Erdner’s face as he keeps looking back at the western …

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Food & Wine

Bet the Farm

by Virginia Phillips

Selected by owners Jack and Dale Duff from a small field of candidates, they have been operating the venerable Blackberry Meadows Farm all summer under a lease/purchase agreement. With heads full of “green” theory and their own, seemingly endless renewable energy, the four entrepreneurs have passed the halfway mark in the growing season and are …

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Birds

Golden Eagles

by David Liebmann

Invisible superhighways. That’s one way to describe the rising air currents that will whisk raptors through central Pennsylvania during this season’s migration. Golden Eagles, attuned to the subtle relationships between topography and wind, will scan our state’s prominent ridges and deep valleys as they soar southward as they have for millennia. Golden Eagles are vaguely …

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Books

When We Get There

by Sandra Levis

Now that Pittsburgh has washed the soot from its buildings and reinvented itself for the 21st century, it is often easy to forget that our fair city was once a coal town, sitting atopone of the oldest and richest mineral deposits in the world. The prehistoric energy compressed within the fabledPittsburgh seam fueled America’s industrial …

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Arts

A Frame to Conjure With

by Graham Shearing

A few years ago, if you had the good fortune to work as a porter at one of the major auction houses in New York or London, you might have had the greater good fortune to be handed a picture frame, discarded by one of the purchasers of the painting. It was one of the …

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Homes

A Cottage Charmer

by Marylynn Uricchio

The before pictures of the house in Fox Chapel would send a chill through the heart of even the most accomplished renovator. An 1870s cottage married to a 1950s ranch created a charmless union, to say the least. “I walked in, saw the living room and said, ‘We’ll take it,’” Betsy Deiseroth recalls with a …

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Arrivals

Lane, Meachem, Anderson, Keeler, LaCasse, Gleason, Gunther, Howard

by PQ Staff

Linda S. Lane is the deputy superintendent of the Pittsburgh Public Schools. A 2003 classmate of Superintendent Mark Roosevelt at Broad Superintendents Academy, she comes to Pittsburgh from Des Moines, Iowa, where she was deputy superintendent of the Des Moines Public Schools.She was the first female and minority to serve as Des Moines’ chief operating …

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Region

Job Health Not So Simple

by John G. Craig, Jr.

If you read the daily newspaper, listen to news radio or watch the local TV news, you’ll get a report in the first week of every month on the latest Pittsburgh unemployment rate. It is a news tradition of decades. The data come from the state Dept. of Labor and Industry one month after the …

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Profiles

Westinghouse CEO: Steve Tritch

by John Buckman

We Pittsburghers have had our share of recent good news/bad news upon which we can pontificate over summer cocktails — the challenge of population loss vs. the glory of again being the most livable city. We can also prattle on about our region’s CEOs — better they be homebred or global business stars? With Westinghouse Electric’s …

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Education

Give me a “P”

by Jeffery Fraser

By 1995, a dark cloud had settled over the University of Pittsburgh. It was taking a beating in the press as it struggled to deal with one controversy after another. Leadership at the highest level was in transition. Once-generous state subsidies to support its operations were drying up. And when hopes turned to the notion of …

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Opinion

No regrets

by K.J. Bryant

When I drove my 22-year-old son from our home in Los Angeles to his new life in San Francisco, I didn’t realize I, too, was starting off on a new road. I used the six-hour drive to deliver last-minute motherly advice. He wanted to talk about his dream of becoming a musician. For him, the …

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