Articles Archive - Page 93 of 153 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Despite the improvement in the region’s air quality in recent years, southwestern Pennsylvania still fails to meet federal health-based standards for various major air pollutants, such as ground-level ozone, sulfur dioxide and fine particulates, known as PM2.5. And that regional pollution elevates risks of cancer, respiratory ailments and other serious health problems. Air pollution increases …

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Regional News

Does Air Quality Matter to Young Workers?

by Mike Wereschagin

As their due date neared last fall, Ryan Poling and his wife faced a difficult decision. Did they want to raise their daughter in Pittsburgh, the city in which they’ve built a life during the last nine years, or pick up and move across the country, near Poling’s family in California? “It’s really hard to …

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Nature

Building the Buzz

by Deborah Weisberg

On a brisk October morning, Dr. Bill Bookwalter dons a billowy, white beekeeping suit complete with veil and hikes up a hill behind his Fox Chapel home to harvest honey. Most days, you’ll find him in surgical scrubs, but during his downtime, Bookwalter, a neurosurgeon, practices apiculture: he maintains colonies of bees. While the honey …

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Sports

A Modest Proposal

by Marino Parascenzo

Mother Nature has a sense of humor and the soul of Monet. The change in the yard was startling. In just a week it went from being a crabgrass plantation to a breathtaking carpet of fluffy, soft-white clover, a pastel hand-delivered from the French master himself. But lawns are supposed to be neat and clean …

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Profiles

Christina Cassotis, Allegheny County Airport Authority

by Jeff Sewald

I grew up in Southern New Hampshire in essentially a suburb of Boston. My mother was a homemaker, as many women were back then, and my father was a commercial airline pilot for Pan American World Airways, having been a U.S. Marine fighter pilot during the Vietnam War. I’m the oldest of four kids: two …

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History

Pittsburgh to Gettysburg

by Kellie B. Gormly

During a muggy June in 1863, Civil War-weary Pittsburghers panicked at rumors that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was marching his Army of Northern Virginia toward Pennsylvania. The rumors, as we now know a century and a half later, were indeed true—although Pittsburgh was about 200 miles west of the small farming town of Gettysburg …

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Travel

Bring on the Meat!

by Barbara Eichenlaub

Years ago, the Sunday roast inevitably came from the neighborhood butcher. The relationship between the homemaker and butcher was once so significant, that the television series “The Brady Bunch” included “Sam the Butcher,” who was both meat purveyor and love interest for housekeeper Alice. This was before mega-grocery stores and warehouse clubs with inhouse butchers, …

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Birds

The Scarlet Tanager

by David Liebmann

A bird on fire, a male scarlet tanager perched just above my eye level. He was in a tree at the edge of the Upper Fields Trail at Fox Chapel’s Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve. Normally high in the forest canopy gleaning insects in spring and summer, this avian migrant, roughly robin size, had decided that …

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Nonprofits

A Friend Indeed

by Valentine J. Brkich

In 2012, PNC Marketing specialist Shannon Tremblay brought her beagle mix, Crockett, to Animal Friends to have it neutered and take part in their puppy kindergarten program. “I just fell in love with the place,” says Tremblay. “There was something really special about what they were doing, and I knew I wanted to be a …

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Arrivals

Lyke, Harvey, Niepa, Snowden, Oplinger, Dambrot, Rutenbar

by PQ Staff

Heather Lyke is athletic director at the University of Pittsburgh. She comes to Pittsburgh from Eastern Michigan University where she has been athletic director since 2013, overseeing 21 varsity sports teams. A native of Canton, Ohio, she previously was an athletic administrator at Ohio State University for 15 years and has held positions with the …

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History

South Park Cascades, Circa 1931

by Jennifer McNulty

South Park, a 2,013-acre Allegheny County Park in the South Hills has all the features one might expect: trails, picnic groves, ball fields, and even a golf course. In more recent years, modern updates have included a wave pool, ice skating rink, skate park, nature center and a dek hockey rink—expanding the recreational offerings. However, …

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Education

Facing the Future

by PQ Staff

For this special feature, we invited the presidents of the region’s leading institutions of higher education to respond to the following: It’s a time of unprecedented challenge for higher education—with decliningenrollment, increased competition, concern about cost and debt, and increasinglyrapid technological change. How are you approaching your key challengesso that your institution will survive and …

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Obituaries

Steger, Sunseri, Sculley, Livingston, Wilkinson, Croce, Cenk

by PQ Staff

Wilbur Steger, 87: Will Steger was the creator and driving force behind Consad Research, a consulting firm that tackled practical and prospective problems from the streets of Pittsburgh to the White House. After working as an analyst at Rand, Steger left and cofounded Consad, which he ran for more than 50 years. The brilliant and …

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Sports

The Lure of Fishing

by Douglas Heuck

One of my earliest memories was Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s big home with its very high ceilings in Cincinnati. I was 4, and my aunt gave me a tackle box. As I examined the various fishing lures, my father said, “Be careful that the first fish you catch isn’t yourself.” I didn’t understand him …

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Homes

Home & Gardens

by Marylynn Uricchio

There’s a hand-drawn map of old Fox Chapel that shows the original estates, scattered here and there on the great pieces of property they once commanded. Many of the homes were weekend or country places the wealthy used as a respite from smoggy Pittsburgh; with better transportation they became primary residences and were built as …

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Money

Three Simple Questions

by PQ Staff

Each year in our Summer issue, we ask a group of the region’s leading financial experts to help our readers by responding to a question. This year, we’ve asked three. The first batch of the questions and answers follow. Question 1: Since the election of Donald Trump, stock markets have soared and the confidence of …

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Obituaries

Remembering Three Great Pittsburgh Men

by PQ Staff

Henry Hillman, 98: Henry Hillman had a keen interest in the future and an unusual ability to see into it. In the 1970s, his was the voice that warned Pittsburgh leaders of industrial changes that would cripple the city if it didn’t diversify its industrial base. He removed money from the smokestack industries he inherited …

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Nature

A Walk in the Woods

by Thomas Saunders

Cook Forest State Park, home to magnificent old-growth forest, is a prime destination for anyone interested in scenic beauty, natural history and a variety of recreational opportunities. Located 75 miles north of Pittsburgh in Clarion County, the state park is named for John Cook, the first American to settle in the area, in 1826. By …

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Birds

A Belted Kingfisher

by Daryln Brewer Hoffstot

“From the porch at dusk I watched a kingfisher wild in flight he could only have made for joy…” —Wendell Barry (from his poem “Before Dark”) One summer day not long ago, I sat on the front porch of our farmhouse. It’s a log house, built about 1860 and added onto over the years—a happy …

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Retirement

The Silver Tsunami

by Evan Pattak

Editor’s note: The Allegheny Conference on Community Development claims that as many as 760,000 people in the 10-county southwestern Pennsylvania region will be heading toward retirement in the next 20 years. This unprecedented retirement wave promises to bring significant challenges to the region’s labor force as well as such sectors as housing, healthcare, education, recreation …

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Books

Summer Reading List

by John Allison

The forces of the universe have a dark sense of humor. Just weeks before the publication of The Schenley Experiment, Jake Oresick’s revealing history of Pittsburgh’s first public high school, PMC Property Group began to advertise Schenley Apartments, which occupy the former school. “A truly unique historic property modernized to exceed your expectations,” the website …

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Creative Capital

Capital Preservation Paul, Part VII

by Greg Curtis

Well, the best-laid plans…I’d intended to interview the contestants in our little investment contest to get their take on the markets and on how well or badly they, personally, had navigated the various challenges those markets had offered. I was especially interested in what, if anything, the contestants had learned. But I was mainly thwarted. …

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