Just as there are celebrities who are famous for being famous, there are tourist attractions that are popular just because they are popular. Then there are tourist attractions that are popular because they are incomprehensibly amazing. If you haven’t been here yet (and I find that many people haven’t), go, and get as close up as you can. I had been here a few times as a kid and thought it was cool, and I wondered if it would seem familiar this time. It didn’t. Greta was blown away (literally).
This post on social media is about the efficacy of social media. After I put up a picture taken in Pittsburgh, I got a note from Kim Carlsen, who is married to my nephew Ben, and lives in Colorado. Where are you, she asked, and when I sent her the details of our location at Powdermill Nature Reserve, she replied that she was visiting her parents in Berlin, PA, 30 miles away.
So the next morning she and her daughter Sarah came by for a brief visit. Greta and her cousin Sarah went to watch some bird-banding, and to take a walk in the woods to get away from their parents, while Kim and I sat and had coffee. It was an unexpected pleasure on our trip, and it wouldn’t have happened without Facebook.
We’ve driven 3900 miles through 14 states in a month, and haven’t really driven each other crazy yet. We’re in Buffalo now, heading across NY State and into Massachusetts in the next week. We’ve been having so many great experiences in rapid succession that it feels like we’ve been gone for six months; it’s hard to conceive that we’re only about 1/8 through the trip. The blog is about a week behind, and as soon as we hit a boring patch we’ll catch up. Cheers!
If you want to be sure that your bison-selfie will be really safe, you should take it with a long-horned bison that has been extinct for millennia.
John and I were roommates in Somerville, back in 1979-80. I had finished college and was working for an architect in Boston, and John was on a hiatus year, doing fieldwork in entomology and working as a bartender in various places (including the original Legal Seafood around the corner in Inman Square), before returning to Harvard to finish his degree. John pretty much took over the freezer in our apartment, and if you were looking for ice cream you had to move all the film canisters filled with wasps out of the way. Even at that young age, John was notable for the adventures he had had and the stories he could tell. (We weren’t always sure how much of any story was true, but they were damn good stories.) We learned how serious John was about entomology when it was time to pick a graduate program. The best school was Kansas, and the second-best was Berkeley. John went to Kansas, and didn’t get to eat any good Chinese food for years.
John went on to a distinguished academic career, eventually as a professor at Ohio State. But after decades in the field, he realized he wasn’t as interested in the direction in which it was headed. So he quit to try something different. He is now the Director of the Powdermill Nature Reserve in southwestern Pennsylvania, (http://www.carnegiemnh.org/powdermill/), which is the environmental research center of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. It is an extremely beautiful area (and hence the location of Fallingwater and many other country estates of the Pittsburgh elite), and John’s work now includes overseeing the largest bird-banding operation in the country (which Greta will blog about), thinking about big issues of ecology, and initiating a wide variety of studies and research in this area, such as whether they can establish a stand of American Chestnut trees on the reserve.
John showing us an American Chestnut.
We spent an amazing few days with John and his wife Donna, who is also an entomologist. John drove us to obscure places around the countryside to see extraordinary sites and buildings (while Donna was helping out at the local town festival), and put us up in a great old log cabin on the Reserve (much more commodious than our trailer). 
Donna made us a wonderful home-cooked meal, and we went into Pittsburgh with John a couple of times. His institutional connections and tremendous gregariousness came into play here, as he seems to know everyone in town, and he took us behind the scenes at both the Carnegie Museum and the National Aviary. Greta has always been very interested in natural science, and this may have been one of the best weeks of her life – tagging along with the bird-banding crew early on a Sunday morning,
visiting the raptor yard at the aviary and holding a falcon,
getting to observe and talk to the archaeologists who are reconstructing fossils in the museum.
the jaw bone from the first identified Tyrannosaurus Rex, in the storage locker.
and most strangely, visiting the room at the museum where vast numbers of reptiles and amphibians are stored in glass jars:
We’re supposed to be home-schooling Greta this year, but I’m afraid that in the general rush of travel and things to see, we haven’t been as diligent as we might be (although the State of Oregon doesn’t seem to have any standards for this at all). But this past week made up for it – Greta learned more science than she probably would have in all of 8th grade, in a much more engaging way. She also talked to many scientists, and learned what their careers were like and how they had ended up doing the detailed work they did. It was a fantastic educational experience for her, one that might have a profound effect on her life.
John and I hadn’t seen each other in almost 30 years; we reconnected about a decade ago through the wonders of the internet, and it was a pleasure to spend this much time with him. Although his initial expertise was in what I thought of as a pretty narrow area, John had always been one of the most broadly knowledgable friends I’ve had. That knowledge has grown much deeper in the past 35 years, as he has been to almost every corner of the world (acquiring a lot more good stories to tell), and he has gained a perspective on life and the world that I appreciated and enjoyed hearing. One of the great pleasures of this trip has been seeing (and introducing Greta to) long-lost friends, people I’ve always enjoyed and admired. With John this was especially acute, as it was clear how all the qualities he had as a young man had matured, bringing him to this accomplished, meaningful and very entertaining life.
Backtracking to Pittsburgh for a post, as the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History must be mentioned. There are three things about this complex that are great: the natural history museum, the art museum, and the architecture. But the best thing is that they are all together; Greta could look at dinosaurs and animals while I looked at art and architecture, and neither of us got cranky.
First, the Natural History Museum was remarkable, even by Greta’s high standards. As I mentioned in the post about my friend John Wenzel, who runs the Powdermill nature center for the museum, we went behind the scenes to meet the curators, etc. As he points out, it is one of the greatest archaeological collections in the country; many other museums display casts of the fossils that are in the Carnegie.
a whole drawer full of rhinoceros kneecaps
the amazing Alcohol Room, two levels of glass jars full of amphibians and reptiles
the prairie dogs are everywhere (along with the bison)
my favorite thing in the bone storage area. My post-its usually say things like cheese and coffee, or a phone number with no name.
Second, the art collection is one of the best in the country. You may recall that many of the best paintings in the National Gallery were given by the Mellons; they obviously kept a lot of good things home in Pittsburgh too. Perhaps the most interesting circumstance that determines the collection is that starting in 1896, the museum sponsored an annual (then biennial, then triennial, etc.) exhibition of contemporary work, and they often they acquired important entries. So there is a fantastic collection of late 19th-century American and European paintings and sculpture. Many of modern western civilization’s all-star team, but many less well-know artists who are quite interesting. Here are a few images, without getting all lecturey about them:
Caitlin, I think
Third, the architecture is superb. The original Beaux Arts building is opulent yet under control, with grand halls and stairs:
In 1970, Edward Larrabee Barnes (an architect about whom those under the age of 50 have not heard) designed an excellent addition/remodel/insertion, with elegant galleries and a beautiful entry/lobby/courtyard.
I could have spent a week in this museum, the collection is that good. Highly recommended, and Greta still needs to blog about the Indian food around the corner.
I’d been to Pittsburgh a few times in the past and always loved it. I think cities that are squeezed by the topography – steep bluffs and big rivers here – have an intensity that is missing in cities that can spread endlessly. Pittsburgh is another of those cities that was really important 100 years ago, and isn’t now. But somehow it has fared better than many others – reinventing itself, emphasizing factors such as higher education. John pointed out to me that Pittsburgh had as many abandoned mills as any other rust belt city, and when it was apparent that they wouldn’t be revived, the rich and powerful decided to knock them down, to allow for redevelopment, and to remove them as depressing reminders of decline. It seems to have helped. We architects tend to fetishize the “ruin porn” photos of cities such as Detroit, but maybe it isn’t good for a city’s life for it to be filled with desolation.
There are many things to like about Pittsburgh (and a few to hate). First, bridges. As I’ve mentioned, it’s a lot easier to get Greta to look at bridges than buildings, so we hit them all. There are the three identical bridges over the Allegheny from the 1920s, pictured above and below.
There is Gustav Lindenthal’s lenticular truss Smithfield street bridge.
There are the juxtapositions of bridges with bluffs
and bridges with bridges
The bridges are great, but it is time for people to get over this – It’s Pittsburgh, folks, not Paris:
For some reason on this trip I’ve become obsessed with collages of urban fabric – bridges, but also lots of building facades seen together. Pittsburgh is a good town for this.
There are lots of buildings here that are interesting in their own right; like, what’s that bizarre thing poking out at the right above?
and some weird scale issues – impressive facade:
but it looks like they blew the whole budget on the entry:
and then in the midst of post-war mediocre gigantism, there stands a gem (more on that one in a later post).
But no post on Pittsburgh would be complete without a mention of PPG Place. Every time I start to think that maybe Philip Johnson is not the dark lord of American modernism, this complex looms up in my mind. Pictures cannot do it justice. It is the most hideous bit of architecture/urban design perpetrated in the past 50 years (and I will be posting another contender soon). 
It is awful in concept, in execution, in scale, in proportion, in detail (or lack thereof). It is horrible to be surrounded by it, and it is horrible to see its banality dominate the city from a distance. 
But there are certain contexts within which it fits. I can only hope that someday we will be able to classify it as ruin porn.
I’ve never been to West Virginia before, and crossing from Ohio into Pennsylvania we only crossed the little ten-mile-wide ear of it, but it counts as being in the state, and we can put it on the life list. Along with Kentucky – we walked across the bridge from Cincinnati, walked around a bit and took some pictures. It counts.
But we did go through Wheeling, where the National Road crossed the Ohio River. The bridge is amazing – from the 1840s, it is the oldest important suspension bridge in existence. It is not by Roebling, but he later retrofitted it with diagonal cables to help stabilize it.
The rest of the town was pretty damn depressing – many fine old buildings abandoned and boarded up, and literally everyone we saw on the street on a Saturday afternoon was homeless and/or drunk. It freaked Greta out – she had never really seen anything like this before.
We’ve been spending a lot of time recently in cities that were rich and important 100 years ago, but now they aren’t Some have fared badly, and some have recovered amazingly (such as Pittsburgh). It’s eye-opening for a kid from Oregon (where nothing is that old) – the idea that a place that was once so prosperous could decline so precipitously.
We were stuck in a huge traffic jam this afternoon on I-71 in Ohio. We assumed it was people heading to the Ohio State football game, but then almost everyone got off onto the road to Waynesville. We were listening to the radio, and found out that the big event in Waynesville today was the Sauerkraut Festival (where they apparently have sauerkraut pizza). We continued on to Pennsylvania.
Brian and Olga Davies were great friends of ours when they lived in Eugene. Brian taught in the Interiors program with Linda, and Olga used some of her many talents working at King Design. Brian brought talent, insight and dedication to his work, but he always was able to keep it in perspective, and his wry comments assured me that I wasn’t the only one who found academia a bit absurd at times. Olga may have been the liveliest and most stylish person to ever live in Eugene, and there were many parties and gatherings which wouldn’t have been much fun without her.
The great friendship extended to the next generation too. Diego was born soon after Greta, and they were buddies until the Davies left town.
So it was especially cool for Diego and Greta to get together again. They had no real memories of each other, but at a certain level, people who are little kids together always seem to understand each other immediately. 
Brian and Olga moved to Cincinnati ten years ago, where Brian teaches at UC. They live in a house that is the opposite of their Eugene house in every way – instead of being a small, modern house in a big yard, their new place is a big, old urban house on a small lot.
Soon after arriving in Cincinnati, their son Marco was born – he isn’t pictured here because he was at sleepover when I finally pulled the camera out. He is true wild man, bursting with energy and enthusiasm, and made me realize what a change it is when adolescence hits.
Greta and I had a wonderful time staying with the Davies – lots of food and drink and wandering around the neighborhood, but mainly non-stop conversation for a few days. Brian and I sat up into the wee hours every night, comparing our ideas on the current state of life in academia and sharing our insights about cocktails and whiskies. Visiting them made me realize how much we miss having them in Eugene. but at the same time it is wonderful to rediscover that with real friends you can just pick up again where you left off.
Peregrine nation 