is an annual event, most notable for bringing rain with it each year. It’s held downtown, on and around Point Park, the place where Pittsburgh’s three rivers meet. I went down on Saturday afternoon, looked at some of the art, ate something decadent for dinner, then started walking out to the event stage. I was meeting the family for the Buckwheat Zydeco concert. On the way out I passed three booths set up by AARP and Vital Radiance. They were looking for "real people" over 50 to feature in the magazine and were offering a mini-makeover to prepare you to have your picture taken for the mag. I wasn’t much interested in the 15 minutes of fame, but the mini-makeover appealed to me. They put some blush on my cheeks and did a real number with three kinds of lip color. I don’t use much makeup, and I forgot to look at myself after they finished. They rushed me through because the rains came. Robin said I looked nice.

The rain stopped before the concert began, but then started up again. Everyone huddled under umbrellas, tarps and trees, and the musicians kept playing. It was a great concert.

I have a tulip tree in my front yard. Although I had heard of tulip trees, I had never seen one and did not realize what the tree was in front of my house.
Several weeks ago I noticed petals on the ground and looked up to see flowers in the tree. The flowers have lasted a long time, and I have really enjoyed them.

This part of Pittsburgh has marvelous lush, gardens around each house. Unlike the areas around Chicago where everyone seems besotted about growing beautiful, useless, smooth green lawns, people here have a wonderful variety of plants and flowers that enhance the hilly terrain. Springtime has been gorgeous.

Last night I went on a walking tour with the Pittsburgh Landmarks and History Foundation. We were looking at buildings designed by New York architects. It was a beautiful evening and a great way to learn more about Pittsburgh. This sculpture, by Kenneth Snelson, wasn’t really on the tour, although we walked past it.
I really loved it because the sparrows are using it to land on and possibly are nesting inside the tubes. I saw several of them walk into it.

The PPG Tower(s) were built by Phillip Johnson, a New York architect. We only viewed it at a distance but I walked around taking some pictures by myself. Photos are in my Pittsburgh Towers album.

As I discovered last summer having a guest is wonderful, but it is very intense. We went to eleven different places, not counting the things we just drove around and restaurants. We had a great time; Betty is a wonderful guest; I saw a lot more of Pittsburgh.  On Friday we started at the Warhol, primarily to see the Darger exhibit. Betty knew a lot about Darger but had never seen so much of his work. Although this was my third visit to the exhibit, and I am not fond of Darger, it was fun going again because Betty had a lot to say about him. My favorite thing in the museum is this lion:

This is a more interesting view than head on.

From the Warhol we went to the Frick house, Clayton. Again, I loved seeing it with Betty because she is so knowledgeable. We each have very different areas of interest within the wider field of art and architectural history. So we always have a lot to contribute to each other.

Saturday we started with the French and Indian War at the Sen. John Heinz Regional History Center. This is a wonderful exhibit about some of the most important events in the early history of our country that continue to affect us today, even though we don’t think about them. We concluded our day with Joyeux Noel, a heartwarming but very graphic film about the Christmas truce during World War I. With all of these films and exhibits about the agonies and atrocities of war, I cannot understand how we continue to permit our young men to fight.

Sunday we went to church. It seemed appropriate after all that war, but we really went to see the architecture. Ralph Adams Cram built three churches in Pittsburgh. We drove around the Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Homewood that did not seem to be open. Then we went, briefly, to the Palm Sunday Service at the Calvary Episcopal Church in Shadyside, and concluded at a later service at East Liberty Presbyterian Church.
As we drove to H. H. Richardson‘s Emanuel Episcopal Church on the North side of Pittsburgh, we stopped at Temple Sinai, a reform Jewish Temple in Squirrel Hill housed in the former Worthington mansion. We finished the day with a visit to Duquesne University to see the Duquesne Union designed by Paul Schweiker and the engineering building by Mies van der Rohe.

Before I took Betty to the airport today we stopped downtown to tour the Allegheny Courthouse and Jail, also by H. H. Richardson. This is the first time I have seen inside those buildings. They are amazing.

My whirlwind tour of Pittsburgh is finished. Tomorrow I go back to my Japanese Art class, and on Wednesday, we are all going to New York for Pesach and I will have three whirlwind days in New York, hopefully seeing more Japanese Art.

I don’t know if someone really hated this thing or it
was structurally unstable, but the other day it looked like the photo below.
They have since replaced it with another somewhat less unpalatable inflatable.
Photo below.

I didn’t pose this one!

This is Pittsburgh Week, for me. On Saturday, I went on a walking tour in downtown Pittsburgh. We looked at buildings designed by Chicago architects, beginning with the Pennsylvania Railroad Station designed by Daniel Burnham and finishing with the Mies van der Rohe engineering building on the Duquesne campus. Pittsburgh is very fortunate that so many of these buildings are still standing. The train station has become an elegant office and apartment building. I don’t know what the apartments look like but the former public spaces are fabulous.

Yesterday, after my Pittsburgh history class, I went over to Station Square. I had lunch in the Grand Concourse, another fabulous, preserved train station. Then I visited the offices of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, the tour creator, where I collected more information about Pittsburgh architecture. One of my dear friends from Chicago is coming to visit this weekend. She is very interested in architecture, and I promised to be her Pittsburgh tour guide. I’m getting prepared. Then, since I ate too much lunch, I atoned by walking across the Smithfield Street Bride and then into downtown.

In conjunction with a new PR campaign, Pittsburgh has put up these inflatables.
They were chosen in some kind of competition. Each one has a card in front of it showing the artist’s drawing next to a photo of the completed inflatable. Those small images are kind of cute but the 30 foot reality is pretty awful. Size, or rather, scale, makes a big difference.

You can see "Dippy" almost dwarfed in the background.

They were only up for a few days before the graffiti had to be cleaned off. I can understand why someone was tempted. That’s a Henry Moore in the background below.

The Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History are
within the University of Pittsburgh campus, that is, Pitt has grown around them.
One of the most notable landmarks is this dinosaur. The  Cathedral of Learning is behind him. During the winter he wears a muffler, red and green at Christmas, black and gold when the Steelers were working their way to the Superbowl. I didn’t write about it, but that was a very big event here.

This dinosaur discovery was also a big event and dinosaurs seem to have a big place all over Pittsburgh. I’ll have more pictures of them soon. In the meantime, I took this picture up close and personal. Most of the time "Dippy" just looks black. But that afternoon the sun was shining on him and I could see all sorts of colors.

One of my Osher classes this term is about Pittsburgh history. Today we looked at maps from 1815. The changes are amazing. There was a big pond in the downtown area and a much higher hill than currently exists. They graded the hill and used the material that was removed to fill in the pond. Coming from Chicago I am used to the concept of landfill. Most of the high priced real estate in Chicago is built on landfill. What I’m not used to is hills and valleys.

This afternoon, on my way to my Japanese Art class, there was a man with a large portfolio of architectural drawings waiting with me to cross the street. He asked me if I would like to hear a short, funny story.
He told me that the street we were crossing and the Frick Art Building where I was going were once a valley with a bridge going across it. The fountain, at left, is actually sitting on that bridge and everything else is land fill. The land north of the building ends abruptly and you look down into a valley–Panther Hollow. I guess at one time it was a larger valley. If the weather ever gets warmer, I’ll walk around and take some pictures of the valley. That’s where I saw the turkeys walking around last fall.