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Giant Puffballs
There’s something impressive about a mushroom bigger than a soccer ball. These giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) appeared on a wooded hillside in Mount Lebanon, near a pile of decaying wood. Squirrels or chipmunks seem to have been nibbling at them as they grew, which gives them pockmarked surfaces that make them look like asteroids.
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Pittsburgh in 1916
From the Rotarian magazine, May, 1916. Note the skyline filled with beaux-arts classical towers, most of which are still here today, although they are dwarfed by more modern skyscrapers..
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A Skyscraper Rises
The new Tower at PNC Plaza will be our tallest skyscraper since the boom of the 1980s, when four of our five tallest buildings went up. The new building will be our seventh-tallest when it is completed, bumping the Cathedral of Learning down to eighth-tallest. It’s supposed to be “the world’s greenest skyscraper,” and it will be full of the latest green tech. But it all starts with the same steel cage that has formed the basis of almost every tall building since the 1890s.
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Carpenter Log House, Boyce Park
The Carpenter Log House was built about 1820, according to the sign in front of it. Log houses like this are surprisingly abundant here even now; often they are encrusted with later siding, and no one suspects the logs underneath until renovations have to be done.
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Telamones on the Park Building
The Park Building, designed by George B. Post and built in 1896, is a feast of classical detailing, and probably our oldest existing skyscraper, depending on our definition of “skyscraper.” (The Conestoga Building, built in 1892, is our earliest steel-cage building, but it is only seven storeys high.)
No one knows for sure who sculpted the row of telamones that hold up the roof, but it is certainly one of Pittsburgh’s most memorable and yet most neglected sights—neglected because few pedestrians ever look up to see the figures glowering down at them.
The Park Building is at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street, a short walk from either Steel Plaza or Wood Street subway station.
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Country Road
A country road near Wexford, not yet lined with townhouse developments and strip malls. Milkweeds are turning yellow and maples are turning red.
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Skinny Building
Is this the narrowest building in the world? That depends on how you define “narrowest” and “building.” At five feet two inches deep, the Skinny Building is at least remarkably skinny. A building in Vancouver’s Chinatown is listed by recordkeepers as the shallowest in the world, but although its ground floor is four feet eleven inches deep, oriels make the upper floor much deeper.
The Skinny Building is at Forbes Avenue and Wood Street, a few blocks from the Wood Street subway station.
