Author Archives: admin

Architects have their competing theories of architecture, and they have poured out rivers of ink trying to justify this or that as the purpose of their endeavors. But the ordinary citizen, without thinking about it, knows what the purpose of architecture is, and probably knows it better than an architect who has spent his life [...]

A quick and heavy snowfall has a strangely magical effect on the city. Our little blizzard in Pittsburgh the other day brought everything to a halt. The streetcars kept rolling, but most of the buses gave up, and there were abandoned cars here and there on major highways. And when everything stopped—when people gave up [...]

  The suburbs have a strange hold over us. Many of the people who live there insist that they hate Suburbia and all things suburban. But—they live there. Apparently it isn’t that they want to live a suburban life; it’s just that they can’t think of any other life to live. More than two millennia [...]

Have you noticed how sparse the selection seems to be in the giant suburban bookstore chains lately? How the office-supply superstores seem to carry ever-larger quantities of the same three kinds of legal pad? Do you remember a time when those enormous stores seemed to carry everything, no matter how obscure? What happened? You’re seeing [...]

There must be a thousand shades of brown in these November trees. October is the month of spectacular colors in the parks and hillsides of Pittsburgh, but November is more subtle. There’s a kind of pleasant melancholy hanging in the air, especially on one of those long rainy days when the wet leaves spiral downward [...]

We make it terribly hard for bars and restaurants to offer live music, but anyone can blare a radio station over a loudspeaker. This is exactly backwards. There ought to be steep licensing fees for recorded music, and none at all for live music. If we made it a financial advantage to have live musicians, [...]

A news story making the rounds suggests that people whose ancestors have lived in cities for many generations may have superior immunity to leprosy and tuberculosis. The study in question concludes that frequent exposure to those diseases in crowded urban areas tended to select those individuals who had better immunity by killing off the rest. [...]

The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. What Mary Roberts Rinehart captured here is something very hard to put into words: that the beauty and the ugliness of a city [...]

No one ever captured the poetry and mystery of the city of Pittsburgh better than Mary Roberts Rinehart, one of the bestselling American authors of all time, who lived here when she wrote her famous mysteries. Here is the opening of her novel A Poor Wise Man, first published in 1920. The city turned its [...]

We make a distinction, convenient but false, between the works of human art and the works of nature. But suppose for a moment that we were extraterrestrial visitors touring Earth for the first time: what would we see? We’d see strange and beautiful landscapes—some of them stark and angular, others green and gentle. Some features [...]