Articles Archive - Page 66 of 156 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

I was a skinny 20-year-old in August of 1969. My Woodstock Fever started on Monday of that week in Rochester, N.Y. I was working at St. Joe Paper Company, catching future cardboard boxes as they rolled off the corrugator. On the way home, I heard a radio ad for a three-day music festival. The ad …

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Creative Capital

The Amazing Human Heart

by Greg Curtis

“Do-it-yourself cardiac bypass surgery: All you need is walking shoes.” —Harvard Medical School Doctors have believed forever that the human heart is so fragile and helpless that it can’t heal itself. The heart can only be improved after a heart attack, they believe, by putting the hapless patient through a car crash—excuse me, coronary artery …

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American Spirit

Dwight Sells Worms

by Kate Benz

The worm truck just arrived. “You know, bait,” Dwight said. “I just got 500 Canadian night crawlers.” The worm truck came from a wholesaler in Ohio that gets the Canadian night crawlers from a guy up in Canada, who everyone knows is a legit Canadian. “Because he said ‘eh’ a lot,” Dwight said. From 7 …

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Food & Wine

The Gentle Maven of Burgundy

by Dave DeSimone

It’s fashionable to stereotype Burgundy wines as overly complicated and too expensive. Becky Wasserman-Hone simply doesn’t buy it. She has heard it all before over her forty-year career as an expatriate-American working as an export-wine broker in Burgundy, but she refuses to let it derail her dedicated promotion of the wines and growers of her …

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PQ Poem

80’s Body Shop Elegy

by Jimmie Cumbie

We kept the radio on all day long. The news came on at noon. Reagan, Nicaragua, Iran. Tommy brushed his fingertips over the freshly primed fender of another rust-bucket Monte Carlo, feeling for waves, bows, any imperfections in the once rotted places he’d filled and shaped with fiberglass resin. Next door, the whitewashed Lighthouse Salvation …

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Creative Capital

The Heart Can’t Heal—or Can It?

by Greg Curtis

Having a heart attack was like having an elephant jump on my chest and sit there for six hours, then wander off into the night as though nothing had happened. Having sextuple CABG surgery was like being in a really bad car crash. As between the two, if you ask me, there isn’t much to …

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Arts

Breaking New Ground in the Pittsburgh Art World

by Vicky A Clark

Fiberart International 2019 is up through August 24, 2019 at Brew House Association and Contemporary Craft. [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”329″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″] “How did a small group of Pittsburgh housewives practicing the dainty craft of hand embroidery give birth to the rowdy, sophisticated, benchmark triennial we know as ‘Fiberart International?’” The answer to this rather cheeky …

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Health

Detraining: How to Maintain Fitness with Less Time

by Joseph A. Luxbacher

Question: “I recently completed the Pittsburgh half marathon. Although not a competitive runner I’m probably in the best shape of my life. However, over the next few months I won’t have time to run my usual 25–30 miles per week. Is there anything I can do to maintain my present level of fitness, or will …

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Birds

King of the Woodpeckers

by David Liebmann

The pileated woodpecker burst out of nowhere just as I thought my students’ field exam was over. As soon as we were aware of it materializing from the canopy of a tree on a green at the Pittsburgh Field Club, it flew like a black bolt into denser woods and disappeared again. A great last …

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Arrivals

Bell, Link, Bachar, Logue, Gould, Dressel, Koverola

by PQ Staff

Maurice Bell is chief of operations at the Port Authority of Allegheny County. His public and private sector transportation career spans more than 25 years and includes work in fixed route, paratransit operations, airport shuttle management, and shipping and delivery logistics. He came to Pittsburgh from Keolis North America in Dallas, Texas, where he was …

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Regional News

Low Unemployment Settles in the Region

by Julia Fraser

Unemployment in southwestern Pennsylvania held steady in June, hovering below 4 percent as it has for the past few months as workers across the region and nation continue to find and hold onto jobs. In year-over-year comparisons, the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area fell from 4.2 percent in June 2018 …

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Events

Summer Safari: A Wild Zoo Party

by PQ Staff

Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium’s annual party, Summer Safari, sold out with over 1,400 guests. Party-goers strolled through the zoo on the warm summer night of Friday, July 26 to enjoy the animals and a variety of delicious foods and thirst-quenching drinks, all while donning safari-inspired fashion. [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”328″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″] Guests this year …

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Nature

Catching Critters

by David Macpherson

The second floor office window of my home looks out over a lovely rural valley 25 miles east of Pittsburgh. Immediately below my window is a field that slopes away to a line of trees about 50 yards away. From my perch, fauna appear intermittently and behave as if I’m not there, as if I’m …

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Creative Capital

Opening the Medical Mind

by Greg Curtis

“Health care’s political economy exists only for the disease. To the system, the person with the disease remains in obscurity.” —Justin Mutter, Center for Biomedical Ethics, UVA Every profession has its sacred cows. These are ideas, policies, practices, procedures and so on that have been anointed as the Gold Standard and thereafter can’t be questioned. Most of …

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Nature

The Fly Fisherman’s Workout

by Don Feigert

Big-woods trout fishing takes the fisherman to spectacular natural places. Wild brook trout, in particular, demand we hike deep into the forest, improving our physical and mental health by walking long distances, relaxing our minds and feasting our eyes on one beautiful vision after another. The sun’s morning rays angling down through dark green hemlock …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

Bringing Back Pittsburgh’s Steps

by Charles Rosenblum

Along Schenley Drive in Oakland, the Frick Fine Arts building looks like a Renaissance villa, well suited to the grandeur of the adjacent Carnegie Museums and Library in the cultural part of Oakland. At the parking lot in back, though, you find the public steps down to Joncaire Street, a descent of 130-some treads into …

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Health

Getting Kids Moving: Sports vs. Free Play

by Joseph A. Luxbacher

Question: “I’m trying to get my kids to be more physically active. What are the benefits of participating in recreational youth sports, like soccer and baseball? Or is it better to simply encourage kids to play on their own?” I’ve spent a career in competitive athletics, first as a player and later as a college …

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Events

Passport to Elegance Charms Guests with Wheels and Wings

by PQ Staff

The third time was definitely a charm as the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix hosted the third annual Passport to Elegance at the Lynx Jet Center on Thursday, July 18. [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”326″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″] Guests enjoyed a balmy summer evening featuring Mustang and Shelby race cars, classic cars and vintage aircraft. The highlight of the …

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Food & Wine

New & Noteworthy: Spirits & Tales

by Tatiana

If you ascend to the tenth floor of the newly constructed Oaklander Hotel on Bigelow Boulevard near the University of Pittsburgh, you’ll find Spirits & Tales. This French-influenced restaurant features floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Oakland, with sweeping vistas that include the exquisite rooftop of Soldiers and Sailors Memorial and its manicured gardens. [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”327″ display=”basic_thumbnail” …

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Creative Capital

The Attractiveness of the Peaceful Hopi Culture

by Greg Curtis

What Robert Redford did—how does he think this stuff up?—was invite the CEOs of Peabody and the four utility companies, along with the two tribal chairmen (Peter McDonald from the Navajo and Abbott Sekaquaptewa from the Hopi) to come to Sundance for a “pow-wow.” And I mean an actual pow-wow. The big-shot CEOs and the …

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Books

Short Takes: “Imagining the Modern,” “The Best Seven Years of My Life”

by John Allison

“Imagining the Modern” is a gorgeous book about a period that not everyone thinks is beautiful: the postwar design of Pittsburgh. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and the popular consensus holds that East Liberty, the Hill District and a key part of the North …

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Books

A Meditation of Life in Twilight

by John Allison

Certain Pittsburghers could read Stewart O’Nan’s “Henry, Himself” just for the satisfaction of having their world described by a masterful writer. The Pittsburgh native’s novel, his 17th, takes place largely in the pleasant precincts of the East End, from well-tended houses in Highland Park to the Phipps Conservatory Flower Show in Oakland, Calvary Episcopal Church …

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