The Fall Flower Show at Phipps ended this weekend. Once again it earned its reputation as one of the year’s great events—especially if you happen to like chrysanthemums. Above, looking up into the dome of the entry toward a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly.
In the Broderie.
A composition in red.
Edward Manning Bigelow was, by all accounts, as corrupt as any other Pittsburgh politician of his day. But he had two things that earn him a place in history: a vision of Pittsburgh as a great city, and a silver tongue with little old ladies. Seeing that Pittsburgh was rapidly expanding to the east, he determined that a great city must have a great park. Right in the way of the eastward expansion was Mary Schenley’s broad expanse of empty land. Mary Schenley was heiress to the O’Hara glass fortune, but she had abandoned Pittsburgh and moved to England. Bigelow went there and persuaded her to donate her land to the city. In her honor, we call it Schenley Park, and—just as Bigelow imagined it—it’s a beautiful oasis of fields, forests, and art in the middle of the city. One of those works of art is this statue of Bigelow himself, which stands in the middle of the street in front of Phipps Conservatory. Here we see it surrounded by the golden late-fall leaves of Ginkgo biloba.
The climate is just a bit warmer in the middle of the city, so fall colors last longer in Schenley Park than they do in the suburbs. Here we have an album of autumn leaves from the end of October.
A late-autumn scene in Mount Lebanon: a babbling brook and thousands of yellow leaves from sugar maples.
Suburban riders on the Red Line, if they have ever lifted their eyes from their iPhones for a moment, must have noticed the peculiar anomaly of Beechview: a tidy and pleasant residential neighborhood with an almost abandoned business district. A good part of the abandonment was the result of a scandal-ridden failed urban-renewal project, in which the city gave millions to a private developer who vanished with most of the money.
But now the mess is nearly sorted out, and storefronts in Beechview are filling up with interesting and useful businesses.
The big accomplishment was finding someone to open a new supermarket, which will anchor the whole business district. The owner of the new Market on Broadway already has some experience operating a successful urban market in Oakland, the Market on Forbes.
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A new neighborhood coffeehouse gives the locals a place to gather and gossip.
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This 1920s-vintage storefront has been beautifully restored for the new Crested Duck Charcuterie, which will be an interesting addition to a neighborhood more accustomed to spaghetti and meatballs in a church basement.
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A neighborhood artist has taken over this little building that was abandoned when the ESB Bank moved to larger quarters across the street.
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Eventually, this clothing store will have a name other than “Grand Opening.”
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All these new businesses face an uphill struggle; most new businesses fail, and Beechview residents themselves, who learned to go elsewhere for shopping, will have to be lured back to their own business district. But Beechview, aside from a strong sense of community, has one great strength most other neighborhoods lack: the Red Line, which brings rail transit right to the center of the business district. Perhaps some of those suburban riders will glance up from their iPhones, see the new Beechview, and start to think of it as a place for dining and shopping.We’ll see.
Phipps keeps a huge stock of orchids in the growing houses behind the public conservatory, so the orchid house is always filled with blooming orchids, no matter what the season.
A Phalaenopsis hybrid.
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Guarianthe bowringiana, formerly Cattleya bowringiana. Father Pitt has always suspected that, if the people who have put themselves in charge of orchid taxonomy were turned loose on the canine world, the domestic dog would be classified as hundreds of separate species within dozens of distinct genera.
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Brassolaeliocattleya Mem Helen Brown × Verdant Venture ‘Richard’: three different genera (Brassavola, Laelia, and Cattleya) are represented in the ancestry of this specimen. (When they get to four genera, the breeders stop trying to combine the names of the genera and just make up a new name.)
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An Oncidium of some sort (old Pa Pitt couldn’t find the tag).
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Are you stumped by this one, orchid lovers? Don’t worry. Sometimes even the experts aren’t sure:
The Fall Flower Show opens October 13 at Phipps Conservatory. Traditionally it’s a big deal, and right now the glasshouses are full of carts and wheelbarrows rushing hither and yon. Here in the Serpentine Room, new mums have already gone in behind a wheelbarrow taking away some of the debris from the previous planting.
Downtown Pittsburgh seen from the Monongahela side, with the mighty river rolling in the foreground.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge was a remarkable man: author of one of America’s first novels, founder of what became the University of Pittsburgh, and urbane wit in what was still a rather rough little city across the Alleghenies from civilization. Here is a letter he sent to the Gazette in 1797 on the subject of duels, which were then a notorious plague in Pittsburgh. It was reprinted in a review pasted in the end-papers of an 1846 edition of his Modern Chivalry, so Father Pitt regrets that the source is secondary and not easily identifiable. “Mr. Scull” was the editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette.
Mr. Scull—The Age of Chivalry is not over; and challenges have been given even in the midst of a yellow fever which, one would think, was killing people fast enough already. The fear of God or the law, are usual and just grounds of refusing. But I will give you a sample of the way in which I get off with some of my challenges, in the following letter and answer on a late occasion; but omitting the name of the challenger, as I have no inclination to trouble him with a provocation.
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PITTSBURGH, October 15, 1797.
Sir—I will thank you to take a walk with a friend and meet me at the back of the graveyard about sunrise to-morrow morning. After what has happened, you know what I mean.
Your humble servant, &c.
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PITTSBURGH, October 15, 1797
Sir—I know what you mean very well; you want to have a shot at me, but I have no inclination to be hit, and I am afraid you will hit me. I pray thee therefore have me excused.
H. H. BRACKENRIDGE.
