The North Side station is our deepest underground station, and the only fully underground station outside downtown. It’s at the north end of the pair of tunnels that carry the subway under the Allegheny.
Compared to the older underground stations—Wood Street, Steel Plaza, and the old Gateway Center—this one is built on a grand scale, more reminiscent of the Metro in Washington than the rest of the subway in Pittsburgh. The decor is minimal, emphasizing the openness of the space.
The map displayed in subway stations, showing the extension of the line to Gateway, North Side, and Allegheny. Click on the picture for a very large version.
The new subway line to the North Side is rolling, and the stations are beautiful and functional. We begin with the wonderfully airy new Gateway station, which is flooded with natural light from the glassy superstructure above.
The mural “Pittsburgh Recollections” by Romare Bearden has been removed from the old Gateway Center station and reinstalled here at Gateway.
The old Gateway Center still survives as a ghost station; watch carefully for it between Wood Street and Gateway. Its name also survives in a curious way; it sounds as though the original recorded station announcement has been clumsily edited. As you come up on the new Gateway station, you hear a voice saying, “Approaching Gateway Ce—.” [UPDATE: This voice announcement has since been re-recorded without the ghostly sibilant.]
It’s a magnificent early spring, and the magnolias are already in bloom. This tree was in full flower beside Fallowfield Avenue in Beechview.
A few more pictures from the orchid show at Phipps Conservatory, which really need no explanation.
The Tropical Forest at Phipps has been redesigned to represent India for the next three years. According to the staff, more than three quarters of the plants had to be replaced, as we see in the picture below, taken a few weeks earlier when the transformation was in process.
It’s slipper-orchid season at Phipps—mostly in the orchid room, although right now the whole conservatory is filled with thousands of orchids for the annual winter orchid show. Father Pitt did not take down the exact names of these specimens, so if you want more information you’ll just have to go see them yourself. Above, an unusual Papihiopedilum.
Another Paphiopedilum.
A very elegant Phragmipedium.
A Phragmipedium with a bit more of a laissez-faire attitude to personal grooming.
We’ll be seeing more of Phipps Conservatory this week, because Father Pitt loves Phipps in the winter, and he has a bit of a backlog of pictures.
John Quincy Adams, Daguerreotyped in 1843, the year he visited Pittsburgh. Could a new two-volume edition of Modern Chivalry be among the books on the table behind him?
—
An interesting pamphlet has just appeared on Project Gutenberg:
Ex-President John Quincy Adams in Pittsburgh (1843)
It consists of a speech by Wilson McCandless (who gave his name to the Town of McCandless, Allegheny County’s most perfectly square township) welcoming Mr. Adams, Adams’ speech in reply, and some correspondence between the two men.
McCandless sent Adams the new edition of Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and it’s very interesting to read Adams’ opinion of the work. He had read and loved it as a young man, and he expects it to be a permanent part of the world’s literature. Whether it has lived up to that expectation is debatable; it is not always in print like the works of Hawthorne, but on the other hand it is reprinted often enough that it could not quite be called forgotten. At any rate, Pittsburgh has at least the honor of having made one of the first substantial contributions to American fiction, and can claim a literary culture well over two centuries old.
Every year, this cliff behind a shopping center in Banksville grows a curtain of icicles. The unusually warm weather this year has made the curtain thinner and pointier.
Chunks of ice drift by in the Ohio in this view of downtown Pittsburgh from the Carnegie Science Center.
