Bird Park, a stream-valley park in Mount Lebanon, is a good place to look for spring flowers, and a fine place to take a little healthy outdoor exercise.
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Deep in the Woods, You Don’t Need a Mask
…as someone remembered while walking the Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel. But it seems that someone forgot that it might still be useful in the rest of the world.
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Seldom Seen Arch in an Artsy Way
This was an attempt to make a modern digital photo look like a nineteenth-century art photograph. Note the rock climbers preparing to climb the stone wall.
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Celandine Carpet in Seldom Seen
Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna or Ranunculus ficaria) may be an invasive species, but it certainly makes the stream valleys gay in the spring.
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Urban Archaeology: The Hotel Henry
One never knows what may turn up at an old homesite. The Seldom Seen Greenway on the border of Beechview and Mount Washington is forest now, with Saw Mill Run gushing merrily through it. But Seldom Seen was a little village of its own once, and the old homesites are full of broken plates and bottles and other items of intense archaeological interest. Here is a plate from the Hotel Henry, once a grand hotel on Fifth Avenue, but torn down in the 1950s to make way for a modernist skyscraper. Was it bought or stolen from the hotel? We’ll never know.
The Historic Pittsburgh site has a good picture of the Hotel Henry as it appeared in about 1900.
Do you need a copy of the hotel’s logo in scalable form? Probably not, but old Pa Pitt has reconstructed it for you anyway:
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Reflections in the Seldom Seen Arch
Hypnotic patterns of sunlight reflected from the pool in Saw Mill Run on the bricks of the Seldom Seen Arch. Go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page to see the video in glorious HD-ish.
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Saw Mill Run, the Movie
Another video of Saw Mill Run in action. You can go to the hosting page on Wikimedia Commons for the HD version.
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Daffodils in the Snow: The Movie Version
If you were waiting for the movie, here it is. You can go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page for the HD version.
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Carnegie International Medal of Honor
The first Carnegie International was held in 1896, and it immediately became one of the most important exhibitions of modern art in the world. Andrew Carnegie believed in encouraging artists by collecting the old masters of tomorrow, and many priceless works have been acquired for the Carnegie’s collection from International exhibitions.
This Medal of Honor was designed for the Carnegie by Tiffany & Co. It was reproduced in the catalogue of the 1899 International, which is a beautiful publication from the golden age of American printing.
