No one has to ask when this distinguished Victorian commercial building was constructed. There was a brief time about fifteen years ago when the West End looked like the next trendy artsy neighborhood—for example, you can just barely make out that this building briefly housed a Steinway piano dealer. It seems that the neighborhood was too far out of the way for the arts community to take firm roots. The neighborhood is still pleasant, but much of the business district is deserted.
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.
…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.
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.
Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna or Ranunculus ficaria) may be an invasive species, but it certainly makes the stream valleys gay in the spring.
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:
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.
Another video of Saw Mill Run in action. You can go to the hosting page on Wikimedia Commons for the HD version.
If you were waiting for the movie, here it is. You can go to the Wikimedia Commons hosting page for the HD version.
