Three wise men AND Three Stooges. Full-on residential nativity scene, Ross Township.
We’re not too proud to admit it: we’ve got a crush on the crèche, make major maneuvers for the manger, and take any opportunity to go nativity when the opportunity arises. That occasion presents itself early, often, and with no remorse on any trip around Bethle…ahem–metro Pittsburgh.
‘Tis the season for plastic lawn decor, strings of dollar store lights, and more baby Jesuses than you’d think a monotheistic society would care to advertise–but that’s what we do. For the atheist, it’s a weird internal conflict–I don’t believe any of this hokum, but man do I love it. If only this country had more wise men, myrrh out the yin-yang, a livestock petting zoo by every newborn and a kneeling camel in every cul-de-sac. Heck, we can dare to dream.
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a spine-tingling Krampus to all and may The Orbit‘s diaspora have the good frankincense to stay safe until Santa can hook us up with the vaccine.
Cinderblock crèche, Polish Hill
Wait…where’s the kid? Millvale *
Forget the frankincense and myrrh, who brought the 24″ Weber? Monessen
Major manger, Reserve Township [Note: bonus cracked Mary!]
Three wise men, two nutcrackers, AND Troy Polamalu (+ “A Christmas Story” sexy leg lamp!), Reserve Township
White Christmas, Lawrenceville
Christmas behind bars, Lawrenceville
Row house crèche, Lawrenceville
That’s not the baby Jesus! Marshall-Shadeland
O Hummel town of Bethlehem, Merante’s Gifts, Bloomfield
Diamond Wire Spring, Ross Township
Cement circle crèche, Glassport
Bloomfield
Front porch crèche, Lawrenceville
* Orbit Instagram user @danko_pgh explains this as “The Baby Jesus figure should never be displayed until very late on Christmas Eve.” That certainly makes sense once’d you think about it, but clearly isn’t followed universally.
A six-foot tall wooden sculpture of a claw hammer is mounted in the arched brickwork of a turn-of-the-century commercial building in Mars, Butler County. It is both uniquely American in its roadside kitsch oversized scale and patriotic red, white, and blue but is also tasteful, fits the unique space, and manages to subtly advertise Pfeifer Hardware without any text at all.
There is plenty of subtext, however, if one chooses to go down that particular rabbit hole. Is America the land of tools, of ingenuity, where anything can be built and anything can get done? Or is it the love it or leave it country where we either worship the stars-and-bars or feel the hammer come down?
Probably the creator of Pfeifer’s big hammer had none of this in mind. He or she may have just wanted to build a big hammer and decided to paint it in an obvious color scheme. While the jingoist use of the American flag always makes us feel a little queasy, the spirit of people taking a paint brush and star stencil to garage doors and retaining walls, porch art and–of course–discarded shipping pallets is something we’ll always get behind.
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
door flag, Swissvale
One year, we’ll celebrate with a post entirely composed of that evergreen of folk-art patriotism: the pallet flag. Their complete dominance of greater Kittanning/Ford City’s lawn art scene suggests we could even go hyper-local with coverage from Armstrong County alone.
pallet flag, Mars
pallet flag, Kittanning
pallet flag, Ford City
pallet flag, Kittanning
pallet flag, Beaver
political pallet flag, Kittanning [note: just reporting here–Pittsburgh Orbit does NOT endorse these candidates!]
flag house, Kittanning
flag house, Kittanning
eagle/flag mural, Marshall-Shadeland
Allentown neighborhood mural
Dougherty Veterans Fields, Etna
Row house window displays are reliably full of red, white, and blue this time of year, but The Plague has us mostly staying at home, tending vegetables in the backyard. Despite the lack of nebbing, we still managed to bag a few of these Old Glory old friends.
flag window, Lawrenceville
flag window, Lawrenceville
dinosaur flag, Lawrenceville
multi-holiday decoration, Etna
America’s not dead … yet. Patriotic skeleton, Lawrenceville
And when the morning of the warning’s passed, the gassed
And flaccid kids are flung across the stars
The psychodramas and the traumas gone
The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars
And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains
She left the night before
Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more
When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch
Whatever else Tandyn Almer did with the rest of his life[1], he’ll have forever authored one of the greatest bits of twisted sunshine pop and doobie entendre soft rock to harmonize and flute-solo its way onto Top 40 radio and prime time television.
Now, it’s probably safe to say the inspiration for The Association’s 1966 toe-tapper was not the mother of Jesus Christ–and likely not even a woman at all. I think we can all assume that Mary’s middle name is Jane.
But the Mary–the O.G., blessed virgin, greatest-story-ever-told, gettin-it-done-in-a-manger Mary–indeed comes along all over the place, just about any ol’ time. Every front yard is Mary’s potential domain; any porch her possible perch. The city’s backyards are so full of clandestine, hidden Marys that we’ll never have a true accounting of them all. [You don’t know how that keeps a speculative journalist awake at night!] It’s enough to drive a Mary-curious atheist into confession.
So on this Mother’s Day, we return to an old favorite Orbit subject: Mary, the mother of all mothers, in some of her various occasions around town. Links to earlier coverage appear below.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mommas out there. While your kids won’t be able to take you out to lunch, may your empty cups taste as sweet as the punch.
Tiny Mary, Troy Hill
Quicksand Mary, Sharpsburg
No Parking Mary, Sharpsburg
Flower pot Mary, Burgettstown
Condemned Mary, Garfield
Monochrome Mary, Bloomfield
Garden Mary, Saltsburg
She’s Mary, wrapped in plastic. Bloomfield
Solitary Mary, Friendship
Sunbathing Mary, California-Kirkbride
The last Mary in Larimer?
Have you seen the back? Mary, Bloomfield
Mary and friends
Concrete shoes Mary, penguin, flag, Lawrenceville
Gas meter Mary, et al., Millvale
Porch Marys (and friends), Lawrenceville
Lighthouse Mary I, Morningside
Lighthouse Mary II, Donora
Mary and daughters, Sharpsburg
Wagon wheel Mary, Reserve
Pedestal Marys
Backyard Mary, Mt. Washington
Bay window Mary, Lawrenceville
Brick pedestal Mary, Esplen
Up-on-blocks Mary, Lawrenceville
Christmas Marys
Christmas Mary, Reserve
Christmas/camouflage Mary, Millvale
Empty Mary Grottos
Empty grotto, Brighton Heights
Repopulated grotto, Oakland
More Orbit Mary coverage:
The Front Yard Marys of Bloomfield, Part I and Part II (June 26, 2016 and May 19, 2017)
[1] Almer’s Wikipedia entry confirms that “Along Comes Mary” is indeed Almer’s biggest songwriting success, but that he “invented a waterpipe called the Slave-Master, described by Jack S. Margolis and Richard Clorfene in A Child’s Garden of Grass as ‘the perfect bong.'” So, you know, there were definitely some other hits.
Golden hour on the lower Hill: City View (neé Washington Plaza) Apartments, Centre Ave.
It must have felt like a dream. At the crest of Centre Avenue, mere blocks above the hubbub of downtown Pittsburgh and the still-smoldering remains of the lower Hill, twenty-four stories of clean, sharp concrete and grid-patterned windows shot from of the earth like a dramatic rock formation or the liftoff armature of a rocket ship, just launched into space.
City View (originally branded Washington Plaza) wasn’t Pittsburgh’s first large-scale, post-war modernist building–there are a handful of big office towers built downtown in the 1950s that meet that description–but its position standing alone, at the top of its hill and with eyes cast out in all directions, had to have felt like something completely different. The future–whether Pittsburgh really wanted it or not–was here right now.
City View Apartments, southeast side
This speculative journalist has driven and/or biked past the City View towers a hundred times and seen its cold concrete form from every direction imaginable–it’s hard to miss if you’re anywhere nearby. But I’ll be honest here, if you’d asked me a year ago, I would have just considered it the anonymous big ugly apartment building uphill from the hockey arena.
City View Apartments signage with abstracted/graphically-simplified version of the building’s design
And then … I.M. Pei died.
Pei, if you’re not a design geek or a regular crossword-puzzle-doer, is one of the giants of modern architecture who planned marquee office towers and airline terminals, art museums and corporate headquarters all over the planet. In his long career–he was 102 when he passed last year and worked most of those decades–Pei designed projects from Beijing to Bloomington, Doha to Denver, Paris to … well, you guessed it.
Old vs. … not quite so old. City View Apartments, seen from Fifth Ave.
The Washington Plaza Apartments arrived in 1964 at the height of Pittsburgh’s urban renewal efforts, the tail end of the razing of the lower Hill District,[1] and just a few years before the real boom in downtown glass-and-steel skyscrapers would hit. With its climate-controlled interiors and uninterrupted 360-degree views, moving from a cramped city row house into a brand new Washington Plaza apartment, mere steps from downtown, must have satisfied many a jet-age urban fantasy.
On this come-for-the-pun, stay-for-the-dessert Pi/Pie Day, we thought we’d add Pei Day to the ramshackle who’s-driving? feel of the occasion. (Just know that the name is actually pronounced PAY.[2]) In this version of the “holiday” we celebrate the master architect’s sole Pittsburgh project and give ourselves the opportunity to really take a good long look at the building, from a bunch of angles across different seasons, and see if its tan concrete and wall-of-windows would whisper its secrets of the modern age to us.
City View Apartments, north face
And … I guess it worked out that way. Perhaps it was because we’re so easily swayed by star power or maybe it was just taking the time to actually look at the place–to set aside a bunch of prejudices and commune with Pei’s big apartment building at street level[3]. Either way, we found that enough time spent walking around the place, looking up, picture-taking, and photo-editing made all that concrete warm up, wave back to us, and glow against several different impossibly-blue skies.
City View Apartments, east face
Look: there are no plans for us to leave our decidedly old-world row house with its boxy quarters and interior windows looking straight out on the neighbor’s brick wall. But there are times–up on the ladder, re-patching cracks in the same 140-year-old horsehair plaster one “fixed” not that long ago–that the mind wanders to an easier, simpler, more modern existence–big on sunlight and small on crumbling sandstone foundation dust. Yesterday’s modernists may have really had something there, and that’s how we ended up here, at Pei Day.
[1] The story of the destruction of the Lower Hill and forced displacement of its (largely black) resident/business community in the name of “urban renewal” is an extremely important one, but not the subject of this piece.
[2] The temptation to call this piece Pei Day Loans or Pei The Man or some such foolishness was strong, but for everyone (like me) who previously thought the name was pronounced PIE, that just wouldn’t make sense.
[3] The Orbit was escorted from City View’s lobby by security before we could either get a good look at the interior or any photographs. We’re not holding a grudge.
If Pittsburgh has a ground zero for human pathos, it may well be at the southeastern edge of downtown, exactly at the point where the “Jail Trail” (aka Three Rivers Heritage Trail) earns its nickname.
There, on the thick concrete supporting The Parkway east and right along the bicycle/walking path, is a stretch of wall surface where loved ones leave messages scrawled in sidewalk chalk for the inmates at the county jail.
The text is reliably heartbreaking, often written in a child’s hand, and is clearly aimed at the missing parent or family member who, incarcerated somewhere on the floors above, may or may not have one of the river-facing windows to actually see what’s been left at ground level outside. Whether or not anyone residing in the big house overhead can actually read these hand-written tributes is beside the point; here, it’s the thought that counts.
One day, we’ll do a full story on this wall as it’s got a zillion tales to tell. Until then, though, we’ve got this pair of artfully-rendered hearts, full of multicolor shading and texture, with circular connecting arrows that echo the message from BM + BM (no snickering!): always + 4EVA.
Depending on one’s relationship status and/or sentimental capacity, Valentine’s Day can be a dicey affair. But from the mass of hearts we run across all the time–red, white, pink, and yellow, spray painted on cinderblock and scrawled on dumpsters, embedded in concrete and taped to electrical boxes–it’s clear there’s a lot of love (or, at least, hoping for it) out there.
Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all!
The key to your heart, Lawrenceville [mural by Jeremy Raymer]
Stars and bars for cars and, uh … more cars. Parking garage flag, Sharon.
No tanks. No flyovers from the Blue Angels. No fireworks, baseball games, or charcoal-grilled hot dogs. Not even a damn sparkler!
No, when it comes to Independence Day, The Orbit is all about the American flag—and flag-like red, white, and blue things—hopefully created by human hands and not too picky with its star count.
We’ll not blah, blah, blahbiddy, blah about the strange folk craft of shipping pallet flags or the ethical paradoxes of letting one’s most patriotic symbol peel paint or get covered in mold. Instead, it’s just wall-to-wall flags. Happy birthday, America!
patriotic dresses, J. Jones Evening Wear, Weirton, WV
pallet flag, Lawrenceville
pallet flag, Oakdale
flag/football, Steubenville, O.
porch flag, Oakdale
porch flag, Charleroi
yard flag, Follansbee, WV
yard flag, Buena Vista
play set flag, Buena Vista
wall flag, Blawnox
window flag, State Farm Insurance, Bloomfield
Uncle Sam: patriot/grill master, State Farm Insurance, Bloomfield
flag window, Bloomfield
Oakdale: America’s Home Town
Fourth of July Savings painted poster, Giant Eagle
Someone really loved Jordan Celovsky a lot; you can tell by the heart that’s been left behind. Attached to an otherwise nondescript stretch of highway guard rail is the most elaborate, and perhaps beautiful, model of a human heart we’ve ever come across.
The memorial sculpture–I think that’s the right term–is several feet wide, covered in rough burlap and then wrapped in an incredible tangle of green leaves and beet red roots. If you never made the connection between woodsy flora and coronary arteries before, you’ll never see them as independent again. We could only wish this past Carnegie International had anything either this imaginative or moving.
The 29-year-old Celovsky died two years ago in a head-on collision on Easter Sunday, 2017.[1] In that time, he’s already had three memorials created along Rt. 837. There was a beautiful hand-painted cross + Harley-Davidson stone left at the scene last year. [See our 2018 story Memorial Day: Roadside Crosses for a photo.] Now this heart and an entirely different cross, featuring what seem to be hand prints from the two children he left behind, have appeared back at the same location. [See photo, below.]
Jordan Celovsky, 1988-2017, Rt. 837
While this memorial is above-and-beyond in several different measures, it’s certainly not alone. Hopefully everyone has someone who cares about him or her the way that Jordan Celovsky’s loved-ones do. For those who die tragically and prematurely–in car crashes or accidents, suicide or as victims of gun violence–the rest of us hold onto a special kind of survivor’s guilt.
How many times have I driven that very same stretch of Rt. 837 in the Mon Valley? How about where other memorials are found along Ohio River Boulevard, McKeesport Road, or Munhall? Whatever the answer, we all know there’s been ample opportunity to end up with the same fate. It could have been me.
unknown, Strip District
This Memorial Day, we’re continuing with a theme we started one year ago: rounding up and focusing in on these very public, yet intimately personal, remembrances of a departed we’ll never get the chance to meet.
The highway crosses and utility pole collections of stuffed animals have become a kind-of people’s park outside the cold formality of the cemetery; it’s the immediate, this-is-where-it-happened holy ground for a life cut short.
Jessica Marie Lojak, 10-13-81 – 9-26-10, Lincoln Place [photo: Lee Floyd]
CB, 1/21/59-3/27/15, Mon-Fayette Expressway
Nick, Lincoln Place [photo: Lee Floyd]
Eric, Glassport
Jazmere B. Custis, Munhall [photo: Lee Floyd]
Nicholas W. Marino, Lincoln Place [photo: Lee Floyd]
unknown, McDonald
Linda’s Garden, Slickville
unknown, Bellevue
Derek Durand #23, Butler-Freeport Community Trail
unknown (“We love U (?) … R.I.P.”), Lincoln Place [photo: Lee Floyd]
It would be an incredible oversight to let the day go by without a mention of the lives lost in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. Unlike, say, traffic fatalities or suicide–which are sadly so common as to not really rate as news–that horrific hate crime has no parallel in modern America.
Back in January, we ran a story on the beautiful collection of handmade Stars of David that appeared throughout Squirrel Hill in the months following the massacre. [See “Higher and Higher: Star-Gazing in Squirrel Hill,”Pittsburgh Orbit, Jan. 13, 2019.] That display is just about as powerful a memorial as we can imagine.
The photo below, though, taken on the Monday morning after the attack at (Tree of Life victim) Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz’s office in Bloomfield, was its own kind of loving memorial. The spontaneous leaving of dozens of flower bouquets outside an office that may have been incapable of opening for the day says as much as the love and respect of this particular departed as anything else.
Office of Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, Bloomfield
Finally, a personal connection. If you regularly walked Centre Avenue near the Giant Eagle you knew Roger. A constant positive spirit and kind soul who spent many of his days camped-out on the pavement, using black Sharpie markers to create goofy-faced pet rocks and elaborate dream worlds on discarded sheets of cardboard.
Working in the area, I got to know Roger a little bit–filling his coin cup now and again, along with buying him the occasional serving of take-out soup or fried chicken from the grocery store. The Orbit’s co-assistant to the mail room intern and spiritual time lord Lee did a lot better than me–regularly hooking Roger up with fresh fruit, cash money, and restocking his marker supply. I wish I’d have done more when I had the chance.
This Memorial Day, let’s all try to help each other get along in this life so we don’t live with any regret when they reach the next one.
big bunnies at Kraynak’s Easter Bunny Lane, Hermitage
Flowers pop in full bloom way ahead of schedule as fairies mingle with enormous fuzzy caterpillars. Giant Easter eggs dangle from tree limbs while an array of butterflies lift off in a spectacularly-coordinated squadron. An indoor forest is filled with the world’s most cuddly cavalcade of bunnies and geese, pigs and lambs, bears, owls, and raccoons.
Existing somewhere between the topsy-turvy psychedelic overload of the Wonka Chocolate factory and the kind of über-wholesome family entertainment one would see in a Christian cartoon program, Kraynak’s Easter Bunny Lane is an avenue like no other.
spring flowers and besuited geese
fairy scene
Kraynak’s, located 70 miles north of Pittsburgh in the town of Hermitage, has created its own little empire since it first opened in 1949. We don’t know what it was like back then, but today the large site on State Street includes an enormous retail store selling just about any frivolity one can name, a lawn and garden center, and soon-to-be-hopping six-bay plant nursery.
The store’s commerical jingle–an ear worm that makes “It’s a Small World” sound like Stockhausen–claims “It’s always Kraynak’s time of year.” That may be true, but they really put on the dog for the two big Christian holidays. That’s what brought us up north, our eyes all aglow with pre-resurrection fever, to Easter Bunny Lane.
Dump n’ Dine
Sesame Street
You get to Easterland–yes, it goes by both names–through Kraynak’s retail store; the entrance is by the massive toys, games, and novelties section on the righthand side of the space. Arrive on a weekend and you’ll likely encounter a line of people stretching nearly to the front doors waiting to get in.
Don’t worry, the line moves and there’s a lot to look at even before you get inside. Once there, the big displays are on both sides of the aisle and each takes up maybe 20 feet of visible space, offering lots of angles and view points to take in all of the visual spectacle. Even this ne’er-do-well photojournalist had the time to snap plenty of pictures and still get out of everyone else’s way.
Bigfoot Fan Club annual campout
Petal’s Pig Farm
Not only does Kraynak’s sponsor the free 300-foot indoor panoply of blinking, oscillating, electric dioramas, but the elaborate displays are completely redesigned and made anew each Christmas and Easter, surely guaranteeing yearly repeat visits from the faithful. Through the magic of YouTube, the armchair egg hunter is able to virtually tour Easter Bunny Lane for a number of its more-recent incarnations. The images are really something else.
Many of the characters and environments we encountered are easily recognizable in the videos from years past. Those same bunnies, flowers, colored lights, and Easter eggs appear over and over, but in different arrangements and altered landscapes. Here, they’re in a cotton candy fantasia; the year prior, the fuzzy crew arrived in a polar wonderland, as habitués of woodland cabins, or partying underwater with technicolor clams and arms-in-the-air octopi.
That said, organizers of Kraynak’s holiday displays clearly want to keep current with nods to popular culture. We see scenarios featuring The Mario Brothers running a pizza shop, My Little Pony, bears dressed in superhero costumes, those little yellow creatures from Dispacable Me, and a cosmic Sesame Street/Star Wars mash-up. [Side note: who knew Oscar the Grouch was in that R2-D2 tin can all along?]
Candyland
… and then there’s Jesus
Sadly, good things must come to an end. Kraynak’s lets you know the party is over when all the color, fun, and movement drains away and we’re left with a starkly-lit somber Jesus on the back of a donkey. This was just the first of three different Sunday school-inspired dioramas reminding the visitor that the holiday is not all chocolate bunnies and glazed ham.
While this atheist dutifully spent time with each of the eat-your-oatmeal religious displays, I can tell you that I was the only one who did so. Like getting past the accident scene on a clogged highway, the formerly busy weekend crowds dispersed entirely as they made bee-lines to the exit gate, skipping the tail end of the exhibit.
night scene with nocturnal animals
Honeycomb hideout/treehouse
Editor’s confession: We couldn’t not run this story on Easter Sunday, but alas, the timing is as cruel as it is appropriate. For any reader inspired to hop down the bunny trail, you’re too late. Kraynak’s is closed today for the holiday and will be packing away Easterland, likely kicking off the process to design next year’s epic display.
Until then, you’ve–gulp–got Christmas to look forward to. Kraynak’s promises the Yuletide dioramas will be jing-jing-jingling at you by September 10. That’s a couple seasons away, but, you know, at “your store for all seasons” it’s always Kraynak’s time of year.
Kraynak’s “Store for all Seasons,” State Street, Hermitage
Sesame Street
Getting there: Kraynak’s is located at 2525 East State Street in Hermitage. It takes an hour and change to drive up from Pittsburgh.
It would figure that someone named Valentino would get busy this time of year. The surname is likely a coincidence, but artist Lisa Valentino answered the call for found-around-town hearts early, often, and with remarkable geographic reach. That could be explained–at least partially–by an ongoing project to walk all the streets of Pittsburgh (“WATSOP”). [Yes: we’ll have to follow up with Lisa on this particular endeavor.]
Valentino and reader Linda Smith both turned in some terrific found hearts for our Valentine’s Day challenge. Graffiti, murals, street art, nature, and even that plague of public works crews: the “love lock”–they’re all there. To the rest of you slackers: show a little love next time!
It’s heart season–pink and red, gooey and sugary, frilly and fragrant. Yes, Valentine’s Day is upon us again. Dropped strategically at the apex of winter blahs and spaced weeks–months even–from the next closest chocolate-and-champagne retail opportunity, we know it’s here because it’d be a gray ghost town without it.
Even as cynical as this “holiday” can feel, love–in all its many forms–is a wonderful thing to be celebrated. Whether or not Cupid is out to get you or you’re just hanging with the philias at the Love Moose, The Orbit has collected a season’s worth of found-on-the-street hearts. Consider them our Valentine to you.
fraternal love: Moose lodge, Irwin
yes, love is full of red tape, Bloomfield
heart house, Garfield
…sittin’ in a swing, C-O-L-L-U-D-I-N-G, Lawrenceville
