Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is a strange experience of a city.  The topography is obedient to the two great rivers that merge to form the mighty Ohio River, so that the streets do not seem to have an apparent logic or design or concept which in other cities makes driving more instinctive.  Of course, we did all our driving listening to the lady inside the IPhone so that is a passivity which inclines one to ignore the larger experience for the particularities of "in a quarter mile turn right on Fifth Street," and similar gentle admonitions.  Pittsburgh was built on several industries that faltered in the second half of the twentieth century an economic devastation from which the place is now making a comeback.  There are sections of small red brick nineteenth century housing which are glorious in their original fenestration and other details, coming out of their deterioration and when the entire section is restored how beautiful it will be!  That is the section where the AndyWarhol Museum is located and thus a destination for anyone interested in the man who changed utterly the direction of American fine art.  Another much smaller institution, The Mattress Factory, has sprung up in the same area, devoted, if I can guess after one visit, more to concept art than anything else, and the day we visited, surprisingly active in attendance.  It is really worth the visit, just for its kookiness.  On the streets around here one senses the emergence of a community; twenty years from now, maybe even ten this will be the place to live.  Over on some of the wooded hills there are the palatial homes of the nineteenth century robber barons, Heinz, Frick, and so on and so forth, which makes me think mutatis mutandis of some of the oversize newly built houses in Sarasota in our own age of grotesque excess.  Driving through the city provided an insight into another way of road life, most spectacularly in the way which so many drivers treated red lights as just a suggestion, blithely moving along streets which were breath-taking in their narrowness, lined with the oversize present day automobiles.  I guess for this reason I absolutely fell in love with the cars and buggies on display in a museum at the Frick mansion, every one of them, even the pretentiously oversized, seemed so in tune with the proportions of a human being.  The hills, the forests of large trees in their summer greenery, the pomposity of the public architecture, everything hinting at Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals, set into a network of streets and bridges (hundreds of them!) that defied intuition made me leave after four days with the sensation that, yes, I have been to Pittsburgh, but even despite going to dinner on the top of Mt. Washington, and surveying the whole through the restaurant's plate glass windows, I did not in any way at all "know" Philadelphia.