Articles Archive - Page 150 of 155 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

The bustling borough of Canonsburg, 20 miles due south of Pittsburgh, was incorporated Feb. 22, 1802, on what Mother always called George Birthington’s Washday. Yes, it was a bit disrespectful. But so was Mother. And so, for that matter, was George. The Father of Our Country spent a lot of time in those parts during …

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Travel

Putnam Place

by Barbara Eichenlaub

Few things satisfy more on a warm summer day than strolling through a beautiful garden and then selecting and cutting flowers for a perfect arrangement. If you don’t have the time, space or talent to cultivate and tend a cutting garden, The Putnam Place, about a mile from Bakersfield (in the Laurel Highlands), is a …

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Sports

The Course Loved ‘Round the World

by Marino Parascenzo

The U.S. Golf Association began staging the U.S. Open — the ultimate national championship — in 1895, and moves it year to year around the country. The USGA requires, first of all, a golf course that offers a stiff challenge, where the rough is deep, the greens fast and par is an outstanding score. It’s …

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Birds

The Hummingbird is a Powerhouse

by David Liebmann

Endurance athlete, feather-weight fighter, acrobat: all describe the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, smallest member of eastern North America’s avifauna and the only hummer to breed in western Pennsylvania. If you could hold one of these tiny birds to your ear, you’d hear a heart beating 250 times a minute—at rest. That rate rockets to some 1,200 beats …

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Books

The Oldest Trick in the Book

by Sandra Levis

With an estimated 2,000 new and reissued titles entering the book market each week, no one can read everything. Now, thanks to Pierre Bayard, a French critic and psychoanalyst, no one actually has to read anything. The author of How to Talk About Books One Hasn’t Read? (Comment Parler des Livres Que l’On N’a Pas …

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Innovation

Can Video Games Save the World?

by Reid R. Frazier

The main entrance to the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center off Second Avenue looks like the inside of a space ship. Neon blue and purple lamps wash the corridor with cool, luminescent hues, like a Death Star antechamber, and trapezoidal wall moldings recall Star Trek interiors. “Blast door” portcullises, complete with tooth-like eaves ready to …

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Innovation

No cubicles

by Parker Snyder

If any company represents creativity, success and a new paradigm, it’s Google. With an Internet advertising model that’s revolutionizing the industry and racking up money click by click, Google’s methods and its market cap represent a wish list for many companies. Its recent opening of an office in Pittsburgh was an easy decision for the …

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Arts

Keepers of the Flame

by Dan Fitzpatrick

Standing in his new South Side studio, a patchwork of windows letting in the mid-day light, glass artist Drew Hine reaches for a map to illustrate his connection to the early days of Pittsburgh glassmaking, an industry that emerged 210 years ago from a red-hot amalgam of sand, ash, lime and coal. “It happened right …

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Homes

A Country Idyll

by Marylynn Uricchio

Rough-hewn stone, wood and copper are traditional materials for a country house, though the only thing country about the residence designed by Roger Ferri some 20 years ago is its location. It sits by a stream tucked away from interruption in a quiet part of Western Pennsylvania, and little about it has changed since the …

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Arrivals

Sullivan, Wright, Kindler, Tomlin, Balzano, Brubach, Paternostro, Palmer, Honeck

by PQ Staff

Mark L. Sullivan is vice chairman and chief financial officer of recently formed TriState Capital Bank. He has been a leader in the financial services industry for more than 35 years, starting at Price Waterhouse, where be eventually became partner. In Philadelphia most recently, he served as a member of Ernst & Young’s Partner Advisory …

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Profiles

Anatomy of a Rescue

by Maxwell King

On the first morning of November, I walked down the long slope from my house in Squirrel Hill to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland for a meeting of foundation leaders to do what people in my position do so many times each week: Assess the merits of a proposal to fund a worthy …

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Region

We’re Art Lovers to the HIlt

by John G. Craig, Jr.

Last fall, PittsburghToday commissioned the first-ever survey of arts involvement in the 22-county Pittsburgh region. Done by the University of Pittsburgh, the survey asked several questions including: What arts events do you attend? What arts activities do you engage in personally? What arts activities have your ever had instruction in? The results are interesting in …

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Innovation

A good lesson

by Alecia Dean

Eleanore Childs may have had as many lives as Joanie Caucus, that trailblazing mom/feminist/late-in-life-lawyer of the “Doonesbury” comic strip — each reincarnation a mirror of the social upheavals of the last half of the last century. As the daughter of Sewickley pediatrician Robert Nix, a beloved figure in that community who, in the 1950s, helped …

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Opinion

The Chair, the Blow-Dryer and the Bombshelter

by Lori Jakiela

The world, my father liked to say, is a dangerous place. “Just when you think you’re clear,” he’d say. “It sneaks up and bites you.” Which might explain how I ended up on the bathroom floor, my ankle twisted, my hairdryer whirring in the sink. There’d been no warning, other than the one on the hairdryer that …

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Business

How to Profit from the Coming Singularity

by James H. Morris

Singularity” is a term that futurists have borrowed from mathematics to describe an event so profound that nothing is the same afterwards. Noah’s flood would be an example. There are four singularities on the horizon, and each offers many opportunities to make money. The internet swallows the world In “Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software …

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Opinion

Get Some Sleep with SOX

by Chris Allison

For managers of public companies and their shareholders, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has done for business what the Department of Homeland Security has done for air travel. It’s a necessary work in progress that makes us feel more secure. But for frequent fliers, such as CEOs, CFOs and their audit firms, taking your shoes …

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Opinion

From the Publisher, Spring 2007

by Douglas Heuck

One day at work a few years ago, I asked a colleague, “Do you ever have the feeling you’re living the same day over and over again?” She told me I ought to see “Groundhog Day.” I’d heard of the movie, and even though an old family friend has a memorable, small role in it, …

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Opinion

Stocks & Pedestal, Spring 2007

by PQ Staff

What a year for college basketball in Pittsburgh! Regardless what happens in March, could there have been a more interesting and exciting hoops season anywhere in the country? First, there’s Pitt. Their defense and passing have been a treat to watch since the Ben Howland days, and that’s continued, as has their great record, under …

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Opinion

Training women for office

by PQ Staff

An observer of the Legislature might conclude there’s something rotten in Harrisburg. Whether it’s the middle-of-the night pay raise in 2005 or recent revelations about the legislators’ fatuous bonus expenses, it’s clear where their interests lie. And with 253 of them, we have the most state legislators in the nation (except for New Hampshire’s anomalous, …

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Opinion

Hold That Thought—Now’s the Time to Act

by Mark DeSantis

“Things do not change; we change.”—Henry David Thoreau Soon you will be asked to choose the purpose, shape, size and basic character of your local government. Fellow citizens are organizing now to ask you whether to reorganize the many layers and types of local government that have defined Allegheny County for almost 250 years. The …

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Profiles

Nathan Davis, Music Educator, Performer, Composer

by Jeff Sewald

Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, are twin cities, with nightclubs and great musicians in both places. The only thing that separates the two cities is a bridge. I grew up playing saxophone in Kansas City, Kansas, and went to the University of Kansas as a music education major. One night, a friend and …

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Obituaries

Lewis, Becker, McCarl, Shafer, Giddens, Frick, Jacobs, Fowkes, Campbell

by PQ Staff

Raymond P. Shafer, 89: Pennsylvania’s Republican governor from 1967 to 1971, Shafer of Meadville extended the legislative term to two years, made Pennsylvania the first state to allow public workers to unionize and tried unsuccessfully to institute income taxes.He later chaired a national commission on drugs, which recommended the Nixon administration legalize possession of small …

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