If it’s the end of the year, you can reliably expect amateur journalists and armchair prognosticators to be looking back, making Top 10 lists, and recounting the themes accrued since January.

At Orbit headquarters, the end of December is when the bean counters in the back room run the numbers and find out what actually got read over the past annum and devote the week to a no-new-reporting victory lap on the year’s well-read stories. Interestingly, this year’s top three–covering a defunct shopping mall in Beaver Country and two extraordinary Mon Valley pizzerias–all came from outside the city proper.

We also take the opportunity to do some additional promotion for other favorites published during the last twelve months. It’s unfair to call these “sleepers” as we have in past, so we’re just going with staff favorites.

 

The Hits

1. Lights Out: The Slow Death of Pennsylvania’s Largest Shopping Center (March 10)

The sad, quintessentially-American story of Northern Lights Shopping Center arrived on our doorstep in that most Orbit of ways. There was no research or planning involved; the location wasn’t known or targeted; it wasn’t anywhere on our radar. And yet with one wrong turn leaving the little Beaver County borough of Conway we fell ass-backwards into the ghost strip mall that devoured the Main Streets of Ambridge and Rochester ahead of its own drawn-out peril at the dual clutches of the fall of Big Steel and the rise of e-commerce.

However they got here, the readership for this one was off-the-charts. The result was a total number of page-clicks that equals a significant double-digit percentage of everyone in Beaver County. We don’t know who actually read the story, but it sure brought out the memories … and the squabbling. Hopefully Northern Lights will shine again, somehow.

2. The Pizza Chase: Nuzzaci Pizza Shoppe Ain’t Monessen Around (Nov. 24)

If there is a pizza heaven, it may well be thirty miles southeast of Pittsburgh in the Mon Valley. For folks who haven’t spent much/any time in the old upriver steel towns, it can be a shocking reality check that not all of the greater region has enjoyed the same level of post-industrial prosperity Pittsburgh has.

Monessen is as good an example as there is of the fallout that occurs when the mill shuts down and all the jobs–and most of the people–leave town. Some things survive, though, and the mind-bogglingly-good single product of Nuzzaci Pizza Shoppe is one of them. Going on 67 years, the little take-out operation in a basement on Knox Avenue makes a pizza that’s like biting into a cloud. It is unlike anything you’ve ever had and it’s absolutely divine.

3. The Pizza Chase: Mon Valley Red Top at Anthony’s Italiano (March 17)

Literally right across the river from Monessen is the sister used-to-be-steel/forever-in-infamy burg of Donora. The little city has plenty of its own struggles, but none of them are a lack of good pizza.

Anthony’s Italiano has been operating for over 40 years and their basic product is a pie whose crust will blow your mind with its ciabatta-like chewy/airy ecstasy. That said–when you’re ready to leave this planet entirely–step up to the double-decker, cheese on the inside/sauce on the outside “red top.” It’s no mere novelty–the subtle structural switcheroo flips everything you’ve ever thought you knew about taste, sensation, and the meaning of life. Get one as soon as you can.

4. Steps to Nowhere: The Thomasson of Essex Way (July 21)

If you want to point to a reason why The Orbit exists, this document of a set of freshly-painted and redecorated concrete steps leading up the alley side of a blank row house wall is pretty much right on target.

The term Thomasson comes from Japanese conceptual artist Akasegawa Genpei and arrived in our ears via the great 99% Invisible podcast. Ever since hearing that episode we were after bagging a Thomasson of our own, here in Pittsburgh. We did that once already, but this one, from a back alley in Bloomfield, is about as perfect an example as you’ll ever encounter.

5. Let’s Get Small: Big Ideas, Tiny Doors (June 16)

Arriving as part of last summer’s Three Rivers Arts Festival, the limited art installation of three “tiny doors” on downtown buildings were a terrific hide-and-go-seek during (and after) the festivities.

Anything that combines ludicrous absurdity, urban egg-hunting, and, you know, little things is OK in our book. Hopefully (organizer) Stephen Santa and the gang will keep the tiny spirit going with a new set of doors on another collection of sidewalk-level foundation walls … sometime.

 

ORBIT STAFF FAVORITES

Precious Metal: The Disappearing Legacy öf Hard Rock Graffiti (March 3)

There was a time when giants walked the earth. Abbreviated to just single power words, their names are legend: Zeppelin, Priest, Dokken, Maiden, Krokus, Crüe. Burnouts, D-20 rollers, and teenage hair-farmers alike analyzed Tolkien-meets-toking mysticism, tapped and plucked modal riffage on second-hand battle axes, and armored themselves in a suburban denim-and-studs couture. Umlauts döminated every pössible occasiön. Yes, it was the very best of times.

The penance for an enviable life rich in metal mullets, keg beer consumed by a river, double bass drums, and a perpetual soreness in the neck and ringing in the ears was to pay tribute to one’s idols in the most public, lasting, and respectful way: half-assedly spray-painting their names on dimly-lit concrete walls. Some of these precious original anthropological traces from hard rock’s golden age survive … if you know where to look.

Animatronically Correct: Hopping Down Kraynak’s Easter Bunny Lane (April 21)

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, Easter Bunny Lane–an annual technicolor fantasia set up in Kraynak’s outdoor superstore in Sharon, PA–is worth the Easter-season trip.

Art All Night 2019: A Roundup with Reflections on 22 (May 5)

Art All Night, the community empowerment project-masquerading-as-(literal) all night art happening celebrated its twenty-second annual event in April. For anyone who’s been on the inside (ahem), you know that’s an amazing achievement for an all-volunteer “organization” with no permanent leadership, no guaranteed location, no board, no funding, and no profit motive.

The once rag-tag, shoe string, is this going to work? event has morphed into something incongruously expected, routine, and arriving like clockwork while continuing to be radically inclusive, completely nonjudgemental, and absolutely vital. Perhaps the biggest feat of all, Art All Night still manages to find available, unused real estate in a Lawrenceville that has way gentrified itself past the event’s original environs.

The Collectors: KISS and Tell with Bruce Gleason (June 23)

American glam/hard rock group KISS has been strutting, licking it up, and shouting out loud constantly since the band’s inception in the early 1970s. In that time, they’ve also been the most product-placed and merchandised musical act to ever debit your Visa or Mastercharge.

Bruce Gleason was a first-wave KISS fanatic who bought the records–along with posters, toys, and games–as they were released during the band’s “in paint” heyday and never stopped. This story of one man’s devotion–some might say obsession–to collecting the memorabilia and ephemera of “the hottest band in the land” was one of our favorites of the year and made us think long and hard about all the oddball stuff inhabiting space at Chez Orbit.

Waiting to Go Off: In the Street, On Target, and Under the Bus with Off Hole (July 14)

A warning: once your eyes begin to train on “off holes,” you’ll never be able to unsee them. The phenomenon of manhole covers, striped with lane markings and crosswalk paint, and reset askew from their original alignment is something that exists everywhere. Just try to walk a commercial block or drive any through-street and not encounter a few specimens.

Like so much in life, the subtle variances in angle and texture, placement and accidental design make every one of these random occurrences unique. This is the story of one man’s quest to document them all–or, at least, share the ones he and the Off Hole community have tripped across, in Pittsburgh and way beyond.

Out of Orbit: Falling to Earth at the Kecksburg UFO Festival (August 11)

Little Kecksburg, a rural community 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, was the perfect spot for a UFO to crash land. Far enough in the country to have few eyewitnesses but close enough to city resources for federal authorities to swoop in and make off with the evidence before anyone could figure out what had happened.

Some will tell you that was exactly the sequence of events in the little Westmoreland County town on Dec. 9, 1965. Whether it’s true or not, paranormal and unexplained phenomena “experts,” truth-seekers, and the like have made “Pennsylvania’s Roswell” a crucial destination ever since. That devotion spawned the annual Kecksburg UFO Festival held every August. The Orbit finally made it out there this year and filed a report with a lot of green, man.

 

That’s it. Good reading and we’ll see you in 2020. Happy new year, y’all!

Renowned veterinary doctor Theodore Nugent said it best: “I don’t know where they come from, but they sure do come.” Dr. The Nuge was speaking to a particular feline ailment, but he may as well have been consulting on web metrics.

‘Tis the season for reflection, year-end lists, and sitting on one’s keister instead of hitting the bricks in pursuit of new content. This is that one time per annum when we open the blogging master console and crunch the numbers on what people were actually reading this year.

It turns out that every single day we still get dozens of visitors coming in to read the years-old stories of Clairton’s ghost neighborhood (2017) and the wacky-terrifying antics of Bill Ansell and his Christmas cul-de-sac of nightmares (2016). Somebody from Reddit linked to our Twin Sycamores of Sheraden story (2015) for a page view spike we’ll likely never experience again.

These three non-2018 stories were our most-read of the year. So this time around we’re just going to go with the top articles that were actually published in the last twelve months. We’ll follow that up with our “staff picks” of favorite sleeper posts that showed up in the lower reaches of the list, but we believe deserve another chance at your eyeballs.

The Orbit will be off next weekend, so happy holidays and we’ll see you in 2019.

 

The Hits

1. The People’s Poet: Billie Nardozzi (Jan. 28)

Rachel Ann Bovier aka Billie Nardozzi aka Billy Nardozzi (photo, top) came into our lives more than a decade ago via the ingeniously-D.I.Y. publishing method of running weekly poems in the Post-Gazette’s classified ads. Lately she/he [Bovier/Nardozzi: “I’m still figuring that out.”] has gone even more big time–quite literally–with a full-size billboard that you can’t miss on Bigelow Boulevard. Pittsburgh noticed.

2. Looking for a Lost Little Italy in Larimer (Sept. 23)

From a throwaway line in the movie Striking Distance (see following item), Dennis Farina kicked this Medigan’s gul into a block-by-block, alley-by-alley trolling through Larimer looking for any traces of what was once Pittsburgh’s largest “Little Italy.” The short version: there ain’t much left. But it was a lot of fun looking, researching, speculating, and hearing the community’s feedback.

3. Take Bigelow! “Striking Distance,” 25 Years Later, Part 1: The Scene, The Meme, The Dream (July 15)

It was just about this time last year–an icy cold New Year’s Day, if this blogger recalls–when the idea came to retrace the Striking Distance “Take Bigelow” chase scene as a prompt for a then-and-now look at two views of Pittsburgh, separated by 25 years. Then we realized that to do it justice, we’d need to wait half a year until the trees were at full foliage and sun was out so that we could actually compare apples to apples.

No matter. That just led the dedicated Orbit staff to a springtime of repeated viewings of the library’s DVD, triangulating locations, and wondering what Jo Christman ever saw in John Hardy. Then Mario Zucca and his amazing original illustrations came into our lives. ‘Nuf said.

4. Heavy Living: Cement City, Donora (May 6)

Little Donora, 30 miles south-southeast/upriver from Pittsburgh, has had a rough run. The mills shut down a decade or more before its Mon Valley peers and it’s now remembered primarily for the deadly smog of 1948–an environmental disaster so severe it was a major factor in the formation of the E.P.A. [This history is all covered in the terrific Donora Smog Museum.]

But Donora has a fascinating history outside of air pollution and there is a small, but committed, group of local historians and preservationists who work hard to let you know about it.

There’s nowhere better to put those pieces together than Cement City–a retro-futurist development on the south side of town. The neighborhood was built just about a hundred years ago on technology pushed by Thomas Edison who saw poured-in-place concrete housing as the vision of the future. It didn’t turn out that way, but Donora still ended up with a great little neighborhood.

5. Color Me In Presston: The Front Yard Marys of McKees Rocks, Part 1 (Nov. 18)

If you’ve never heard of Presston, you’re not alone. The little one-way-in/one-way-out neighborhood is just about as cut off from the world as a place could possibly be and still see the skyline of a (semi-)major U.S. city.

There are inevitably many great stories from this edge of McKees Rocks [Presstonians: we’re just waiting for the invitation!] but last month we dug into an old favorite: front yard Marys. Presston has just about as many–house for house–as anywhere we’ve been.

 

The Sleepers

Groundhog Gonzo! Fur and Clothing on the Punxsutawney Groundhog Trail (Feb. 11)

To live in Western Pennsylvania and not make the trip up to Punxsutawney for Groundhog Day–at least once–is a crying shame. The yearly event is as wholesome as they come and way goofier than we could have predicted. Orbit staff were there for the whole thing–2:00 AM to daybreak–and came away with an entirely new appreciation for groundhog fashion, “hog heads,” and the collective defiance of winter.

That this story–with some fine writing and fun pictures–didn’t get more attention was a bummer. Maybe people were just groundhogged-out by the following weekend. Now, we’re just in time to get the hype machine going for GHD ’19, so take this op to catch up.

Show’s Over: Ex-Theaters, Part 1–Mourning the Recently Departed (April 15)

There was a period in the early spring when it was all ex-(movie) theaters: combing through historical maps, cruising the Cinema Treasures site, mentally reconstructing radically-altered façades. That was all in the service of a planned series on what’s happened to all the old movie houses that used to line the commercial drags of every decent-sized town in America.

We got as far as the recently-closed theaters we could still remember from the 1990s–places like the old Plaza in Bloomfield and Cinema 4 in Dormont, Bellevue’s dirty double-screen and the street-straddling pair of Cheswick theaters. Hopefully we’ll get back to this series–heck, we’ll make it a resolution!–as there are just a ton of them out there.

No Room For Squares: When the Pittsburgh Triangles Were Golden (April 29)

Clint Burton was a teenager in the mid-1970s when Pittsburgh had its own squad representing the short-lived World Team Tennis league. He was there on the sidelines, hired by his uncle to be the team’s stats guy, when the Triangles won the league championship in 1975.

Clint’s first-hand account of seat-of-the-pants sports management in a fledgling league, a wide-eyed teenager hanging-out with world-famous sports stars, and filing game recaps to Super-Tiebreaker magazine is a great story we were very proud to tell.

Tin Can Pole Art, Part 2: A Date with Some Little Devils (June 3)

Who takes the severed lid from a tin can, paints a tiny work of art on it, and then tacks that piece to a utility pole for public consumption? Why, angels must do it, right? And what do these haloed Robin Hoods choose as their subject? Devils!

O.K., the artist or artists involved in this particular genre of pole art may or may not be either divine or particularly pure of thought, but they sure do create interesting little specimens that make for a wonderful ongoing egg hunt.

Incisor Edition: Dental Art (Aug. 5)

If you haven’t been paying attention, you might have missed just how many giant teeth are out there in front of Pittsburgh’s–and the rest of America’s–dentists, orthopedists, and oral surgeons.

It’s a strange phenomenon that this one medical field chooses to advertise itself with large–often 3-dimensional–renderings of the body part to-be-worked-upon. You don’t see a similar number of outsized eyeballs, spines, feet, ears, noses, and/or throats. There is so much great dental art, we’re already most of the way to a sequel. Hopefully, that’ll give you something to look forward to in the new year.

Stodgy Orbit editors still prefer the old-school train wreck. It’s clear, though, that with the change in political administration America has officially moved-on from this tired railroad-age metaphor to the more immediate (if ultimately less tragic) dumpster fire. Maybe this was this was year our fears moved from the cataclysmically abstract and right into the alley behind the house.

Yeah, 2017 was a mess. The “hyper-local” Orbit focus didn’t really cross paths with either presidential politics* or #metoo, but it’s interesting that our most-read stories of 2017 trade in their own form of controversy, despair, and isolation. Of course, these themes are always current.

Anyway, as is our year-end tradition, below are lists of the most-read Orbit stories of 2017 along with some “editor’s favorites” from the bottom of the list.

 

The Hits

1. Ansell Regrettal: A Ross Township Donnybrook (March 6, 2016)

That’s right. The Orbit‘s #1 story for 2017 was published in 2016–early 2016, at that. Maybe it’s because we’ve had not one, but two Christmas seasons since this one first ran, or maybe it’s just that people can’t get enough of the heartbreaking and terrifying tale of Ross Township’s Bill Ansell–a man who just wanted to spread his love of Christmas until his neighbors and the township shut him down. Then his thoughts turned from giving to killing.

2. Into the Forgotten: Clairton’s Ghost Neighborhood (Feb. 22, 2017)

Lincoln Way was a quiet dead-end street of pre-war single-family homes until the groundwork for an expansion of the Mon-Fayette Expressway sacrificed the little hollow neighborhood to connect the highway to Rt. 837. What’s left is a sad, vacant, and fascinating stretch of former homes now in various purgatory states between dilapidation and demolition.

3. A Graveyard for Gravestones (May 9, 2017)

Where do grave stones go to die? One tends to think that the carved granite and marble markers for cemetery plots will be there forever–but that’s not always the case. Headstones are removed and replaced for all sorts of reasons and they end up here, in the cemetery’s work yard for ultimate processing and disposal.

We got into a lot of trouble over this one with neighbors coming up with some wild theories about what’s going on in there. Ultimately, though, it became a great teachable moment for some of the behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts business of cemeteries.

4. The Front (and Back) Yard Marys of Bloomfield, Part 2 (May 19, 2017)

A post-long mea culpa on the false assumption that we’d located every (street-visible) Front Yard Mary in Bloomfield with our first go-around. This one includes another sizable handful of Her Blessedness peering back at us through chainlink fence and alley walls. What can we say? The Orbit loves Mary!

5. Water’s Gone Cold: An Elegy for Tea Bag’s (Feb. 12, 2017)

Tea Bags grinning, sunglasses-wearing logo, painted on the visible side of its brick building in Lawrenceville/Bloomfield has been a constant neighborhood presence for the last several decades. That all ended at the beginning of the year when the dive bar went the way of Michalski’s and A.J.’s, Salak’s and Ed’s.

By all reports, Tina’s (which just opened in the same space after a lengthy renovation) looks like a pretty nice place with an old-school record-playing jukebox and windows that  actually let customers see daylight from inside the bar. We hope to get there soon. They’ve also amazingly left the old Tea Bags logo/mural on the outside–repainting everything else–so hats off to Tina’s!

6. “Wild Animal” on the Loose in Bloomfield! (Feb. 28, 2017)

A brilliant, surprise piece of elaborate street art arrived on little Edmund Street in the middle of winter. Despite being right up against the Bloomfield PNC Bank branch, no one disturbed the tableau of a road cone-formed wild cat emerging from a photographed forest for nearly a week. We still don’t know who created Wild Animal (no attribution was left), but we’d love to find out.

 

The Sleepers

If there can be six hits this year, there can be six sleepers too…right? Sure. Like past years-in-review, here are some stories from the last twelve months that didn’t get the level of attention  like the ones above. Our editors thought these stories deserved a second shot at getting a first look.

Mondo Menorah! Menorahmobile Models Measured (Jan. 10)

Our attempt to cover the bicycle menorah parade this year fell victim to an untimely arctic blast and a (likely-related) participation dropout from the riders. We’ll get them next year (hopefully)!

In lieu, we can throw in this plug for The Orbit‘s coverage of Chabad’s 2016 Grand Menorah Parade in which our writers got acquainted with the array of options available for those who wish to sport a car top, light-up menorah for the family minivan. They come both commercially-available and also in a uniquely-Pittsburgh painted PVC pipe design.

Hold the Cheese: A Pi Day Salute to Ghost Pizza (March 14)

It was a novel way to recognize “Pi Day.” Everyone loves pizza and Pittsburghers really love pizza. But even with that favorable business climate, not every pizza shop manages to survive. The unique landscape of many former pizzerias plus general vacancy leads to an ideal climate for what we call ghost pizza–the leftover signage, iconography, and architecture of independent pizza shops that are now shuttered.

Pain’t That America: The Front Yard Patriotism of Gary Thunberg (July 16)

Gary Thunberg is holiday crazy. Four times a year, he pulls out elaborate sets of homemade lawn decorations that cover the front, side, and rear yards of the Beaver Township home he lives in with his mother. We happened to run into him right around Independence Day, so we were treated to red, white, and blue American flags, eagles, crests, and bombs bursting in air. We sadly missed the Halloween display and we’ll have to hustle to catch Christmas. Learn from our mistakes and catch up with the Fourth of July.

The Orbit’s Summer Vacation Part 1: Considering Portland and Part 2: Coming Home (Sept. 24/Oct. 1)

Eight days vacation in lauded, lampooned, and local/organic Portland, Oregon was the prompt for a pair of posts on a bunch of nuts-and-bolts city things they’re doing right out there and a follow-up coming-home love letter to what we love about Pittsburgh.

An Urban Hike: William Street, Mount Washington (Oct. 22)

We didn’t cover as many nature stories/tales of the city steps this year, but this was a good one. Little William Street snakes down the side of Mount Washington in a way that both rewards the hiker with several terrific views of downtown and a heady dose of that uniquely Pittsburgh sensation of being way out in the woods when you’re still right in the middle of the city.

James P. Leaf Mausoleum, Beaver Cemetery (Nov. 5)

There’s an old saw that if you haven’t had a “Geraldo moment,” then you’re not blogging. The Leaf Mausoleum was ours. There’s just got to be a great story behind the nutty collection of  rocks assembled to entomb Beaver County civil engineer James P.  Leaf, but after a year of searching, we couldn’t figure anything out.

Regardless, it was still a fascinating construction to go dig around for, observe in a couple different seasons, and ponder on the hows and whys–plus, you’re right across the street from Gary Thumberg’s house! Let us know if you figure something out.

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* A notable exception would be our post-inauguration piece “On Making America Great … Again” (Pittsburgh Orbit, Feb. 19, 2017).

Tis the season for year-end lists and the ghosts of blogging past. As The Orbit bids adieu to 2016, our last post of this annum is a little look back at both the year’s greatest hits as well as some overlooked gems.

The former is easy to work out–we’re just relying on straight analytics for page-views. Frankly, we were a little surprised by what the green visored bean-counters turned up in their and ticker-tape results, but the numbers don’t lie–at least, they should be pretty close.

For the latter, our editorial staff selected an equal number of personal favorites that somehow managed to end up in the bottom percentile of the very same stats. Hopefully, you’ll give them another chance.

The Hits

1. Jerry’s Records and the $30 Instant Record Collection (Feb. 21)

“Jerry’s Records is a local institution and a national treasure,” The Orbit‘s #1 story of 2016 begins, and apparently America agreed. In this piece, the crew make the argument for record collecting as cheap fun and cultural preservation while urging you to pick up loose copies of ’80s soundtracks, ’30s jazz, and The Romantics’ In Heat. Nearly a year later, we stand by each and every one of these recommendations and urge you to get your keister down to sit on Santa’s…er, Jerry’s lap and tell him what you want the very next chance you get.

2. Pittsburgh’s Next Hottest Neighborhoods (March 23)

Looking to invest in an up-and-coming neighborhood? Hoping to distinguish a bland urban void? NoSOak, PaHolE/WheBiJIs, and VoBeShaBlo are just three of the suggested rebrandings/”acronames” for less-defined and ripe-for-the-gentrification sections of the city. Get there now and plant some roots before all the parking is gone. Those craft beers aren’t going to brew themselves!

3. More Golden Babies! [or] A Golden Baby Boom! (Jan. 31)

Our continued coverage of Pittsburgh’s mysterious dangling golden babies “deserves the Pulitzer,” according to one Orbit reader. Four separate stories spread over eight months of 2016 chronicle the strange tale of an elaborate act of street art and/or pranksterdom that goes all the way to the top! … or, at least, all the way to the Department of Public Works. Only the second installment made our Top 5, but check out the whole set if you really want to sort-of know what’s going on.

P.S. The saga of the golden babies is far from over, so hopefully 2017 will bring us another entry in this series.

4. The Pizza Chase: P&M Pizza, Arnold (Oct. 7)

“There’s more to hair than real hair,” George Willard reminds us in his classic song “Wig Store”. Similarly, greater New Kensington’s pizzerias are happy to let you know there’s more to cheese than real cheese. What they’re cooking up out at the great P&M Pizza in Arnold and across the river at Phillippi’s in Natrona Heights is a defiantly Alle-Kiski Valley concoction of “micro-crust ambiguously-cheesed bar pizza” that ain’t for everyone, but The Orbit calls “absolutely gooey-great”–at least, after a hard morning of pawpaw picking.

5. Street Beat: Who is the Dirty Poet? (March 20)

One dude (and yes: it is a dude) with a healthy set of legs, one big roll of Scotch tape, and a whole lot on his mind has been distributing his poetry throughout Pittsburgh for the last fifteen years. By turns, the verse is loose, personal, true, vulgar, cynical, sly, smart-alecky, profane, and, yes, possibly (but not usually) dirty. You’ve either seen his colored Xeroxes on telephone poles and street light bases or you haven’t been looking.

We tracked The Dirty Poet down, signed the non-disclosure agreements, and filed a pretty tasty piece on the whole deal. Enough of Pittsburgh must have been wondering about this guy too as this poet’s post earned him a spot in The Orbit‘s year-in-review Top 5.

The Sleepers

Up In Smoke: Ex-Snack Shops (April 20)

This one sure had The Orbit‘s editorial board chortling smugly: we’ll run a story about former munchies supply shops on 4/20! Maybe our audience was just too doobied-up to bother reading the day’s news, but this fun look at a bunch of ex-ice cream parlors, Coney houses, and corner stores featured some great photographs of long-gone snackeries and sure struck our collective smoke-free funny bone.

Muffler Man: The Cadet Cowboy (May 22)

It can’t be easy standing thirty feet tall, but Big Sam is lucky enough to know a place with hamburgers just his size. This giant has been vigilantly watching over the fantastic Cadet Restaurant, just outside Kittanning, for more than 60 years. One taste of their mind-melting rhubarb pie and you’ll consider a long-term stay yourself.

Pittsburgh proper doesn’t have a single, legitimate “muffler man”, but there are a handful in the larger region. Not having made it down to see Mr. Tire in Uniontown yet, Big Sam is definitely the most impressive of the species we’ve come across.

An Orbit Obit: The Lost Art of Found Photographs (June 22)

The Orbit goes all blast-from-the-past in this trip down (someone else’s) (psychedelically-distorted) memory lane. There was a time you could find printed photographs jettisoned from car doors, torn up in tear-stained despair, and blown by the wind in almost all manner of public space. That time is gone (sigh), so we were thrilled to have Kirsten Ervin’s amazing park cleanup treasure to clear the cobwebs and blow the mind.

Alien Landscapes: Color Run Cleanup (July 20)

Six months later and we still have no idea what “The Color Run” is all about. That said, if you happen to arrive on the scene of one of these events just after the whole thing winds up, you’ll wander into a weird alien landscape of iridescently-colored swirling winds and technicolor-bathed Star Trek set pieces. The dazed, color-battered participants slog through North Shore parking lots like refugees from some alternate world where Trey Anastasio is sultan and YPPAH is dictum.

Fairywood: The World Without Us (Nov. 20)

Fairywood exists as a superlative city neighborhood in many categories: its position is the most geographically distant to both the south and west, it is (perhaps) the smallest by residential population, and, of course, it has maybe the quaintest of names this side of Narnia. All those features drew us to it, but it was the huge plot of land that was once the Broadhead Manor public housing project that really caught our attention.

Today, all the residential buildings of Broadhead Manor are gone, as are its former four thousand residents. But the ex-project’s infrastructure–roads, street lights, sidewalks, fire hydrants–remain in what resembles every post-apocalyptic sci-fi vehicle you’ve ever sat through. Nature is coming back fast and hard to Fairywood and it’s a fascinating thing to see in this limited window before the whole place gets paved-over once again.

On Sunday, we ran our first year-in-review post on The Orbit’s greatest hits for 2015. They’re not all blockbusters, though. In fact, the gap between rich and poor turned out to be pretty huge with the hot dogs outpacing the small fries by a good thirty or forty times.

Looking over the list, we think there are a lot of really good stories that ended up in this statistical gutter. So the Orbit staff took a gander at the underperforming members of the team and made some choice selections to give a handful of these bottom feeders one more chance to exhibit themselves. These may have all tanked at the box office, but they’re Oscar contenders in this blogger’s mind. They’re presented here in chronological order by publish date.

H.W. 46 FT. 3-18-1936 (Jan. 31)

Our very first blog post–and what a good one to kick off with! The story of stumbling across a strange painted rune reading H.W. 46 FT. 3-18-1936 wrapped around the sharp corner of big former factory building in Manchester. The consideration of what that awkward code might mean and the hand-to-forehead revelation of what it actually signifies is what this blog is all about. Check this one out, or prepare to get washed away when the next big one comes.

The Over-the-Wall Club (April 12)

There were a number of “stories” this year that were really just excuses to package up like-minded photographs we enjoyed and crack wise in one way or another. Among these was a fun one on how great snow and trains look together, a bunch of things that ended up (on purpose or otherwise) with the colors of the Italian flag, and a first visit to the great Forest Hills landmark ex-atom smasher.

In The Over-the-Wall Club, we introduced a very Orbit theme of what’s on the other side? A low-brow and low-clearance street-level pondering of both grass-is-greener pedestrian curiosity and the invention of mysteries of the everyday. Get out of the car, bring your coffee mug, and let’s get together over-the-wall.

A Visit with Jimmy The Greek (April 19)

If you can’t use your blog as an excuse to visit the mausoleum of a disgraced sports betting guru/TV football prognosticator like Jimmy “The Greek”, well, you’re doing it wrong. This Orbit day trip took us out into bright spring sunshine, over the state line, (technically two state lines) and led to a bonus Russian Orthodox onion dome church visit for a story that ended up running the following week.

Get to the Point (April 22)

Ben Blanchard introduces our readers (at least, a few of them) to the quasi-sport/weird hobby of “highpointing” through an Orbit-organized bicycle-based trip from Pittsburgh’s lowest to highest points (we’re talking altitude here–we never made it to see Fungus at Thirsty’s). Along the way we get some nice vistas of the river, trails, Riverview Park, and, of course, the highest point in the city of Pittsburgh, just past Observatory Hill. Then we went for beers at a bar called Rumerz.

Post No Bills (Sept. 6)

The best stories are ones that take a left turn. This post started as a little musing about college kids in Oakland repeating what’s by now a common benign prank you can see all over the place and turned into a fun little exercise suggesting, asking–hell: begging–for a new generation to take it up a notch and do a Pittsburgh version. [Comedy 101, dudes: it’s yes, and…] [You really couldn’t think of our mayor Bill Peduto?] As far as we know, no one has taken The Orbit up on this recommendation, but then it wouldn’t have made the sleepers list if anybody had read it!

Poli-Science: A Double Ghost Exposed in Squirrel Hill! (Oct. 7)

A perfect Orbit story, gift-wrapped in a re-seeded vacant lot and majorly-weathered ghost sign at the site of the longtime Squirrel Hill institution Poli’s. It had everything: a tragedy, a ghost building, a ghost sign, an obit we wen’t qualified to author, and one awkward vestigial pedestal with no clear future, but many possible uses and outcomes. If it’s not obvious, this blogger really liked this story, even if our readers didn’t hep to it the first time around.

Allegheny Cemetery: Halloween Graves (Oct. 18)

We spent a great deal of October cruising Pittsburgh’s glorious cemeteries and ran a bunch of different stories on our adventures. This one on the weird, redundant, and debatably in-bad-taste phenomenon of decorating grave plots for Halloween that happens every year at Allegheny Cemetery was a lot of fun to report and write. Apparently not so much fun to read.

The D.I.Y Graves of Highwood Cemetery, parts 1 & 2 (Oct. 30, Nov. 1)

Another story from “Cemetober” that had so much to talk about we broke it into two parts. Hell: we even pitched this one to one of the many local alternative weeklies (ahem), but those bastards couldn’t even write this blogger back! Phooey!

Anyway, this pair of posts on the deeply-affecting, minimal, highly-personalized homemade grave markers found deep in the back of Highwood Cemetery on the North Side raised all kinds of interesting ideas. The expectation of “permanence” in a grave, the marker’s relationship to the living, and the seemingly inverse correlation between amount of money spent on the headstone vs. recency of visitation among them. If you’re going to check out any one story on this list, consider making it this one.

Mystery of the Tip Top Chop Shop (Nov. 25)

Talk about a blog-based roller-coaster ride! The tantalizing tale of a (pre-suburbia) Monroeville hilltop hillbilly underworld chop shop, its post-incarceration deep woods junkyard, and the inevitable nature-without-man image of trees growing through Studebakers was as in-Orbit as they get. Unfortunately, by the time Moskal & Son led us back to their old haunt, the place had been scrubbed clean…almost. But then it still turned into a fun story! … and then nobody read it. Sigh.

Step Beat: When Tullymet Sylvan (Dec. 9)

Now, in part 1 of this year-in-review we talked about how much people like the city steps stories, but then we ran this really nice one on the neglected Tullymet Street steps and nobody gave a tinker’s dam! There’s just one explanation for that: step snobbery! Yeah, you heard me–if they’re the longest steps or you’ve got Romeo o Romeo calling from the landing, sure. But you try to talk anyone into hiking Hazelwood and you’ll get the same pass our readers gave this story. Freakin’ step snobs.

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See also: The Orbit 2015 Year-in-Review, Part 1: “The Hits.”

Statistics, man. People get a computer and suddenly everybody cares about their numbers. Phooey.

It is the final days of 2015 and ’tis the season for geese-a-laying–not to mention year-end lists-a-making. We decided to finally peek at The Orbit‘s digits and find out what people were checking out (and not checking out) and turn that insight into a little two-part year-in-review on what happened over (most of) the last twelve months.

To talk about actual numbers would be truly pathetic, so we’ll generalize here. In Part 1 we’re looking at the ten most popular Orbit blog posts for 2015, based on WordPress site statistics for individual post-views. We’ll follow-up on Wednesday with staff picks of some of the more, ahem, under-appreciated stories from the year.

1. Step Beat: Rising Main, The Longest Steps (June 14)

People love the steps! That is totally gratifying! Years ago, this urban hiker’s first attempt at blogging was going to be a site entirely devoted to mapping, photographing, and yes, blogging about Pittsburgh’s 750-ish sets of city steps. That fine plan, just like Cop Rock, fizzled all too quickly–and it probably deserved to. The steps are great, but there’s just not enough to go on about for a new story every week.

But at Pittsburgh Orbit we’re able to include some good city step stories without (we hope) having to dredge the river. These seemed to make their way out into Pittsburgh’s bicycle and pedestrian communities and two of them turned up in the top reads of the year, so that suggests the people are with us on this one. The Orbit‘s #1 story for 2015 is about Rising Main Way, the longest set of city steps in Pittsburgh, and one of the longest sets of urban steps in the country.

2. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yetta: The Mosaic Houses of Spring Hill (June 3)

Every man, woman, and child–not to mention gopher, raccoon, and honey bee–in Spring Hill seems to have dialed-in The Orbit to read this story on the terrific little set of old-school wood frame Victorian houses with custom mosaics embedded in their Yetta Street foundations.

We can only assume that artist Linda Wallen has a lot more friends than this blogger does. It’s her mosaics that decorate the Yetta Street houses–as well as other infrastructure–in Spring Hill. On our (long) list of to-dos is to get back there and find out what she’s up to for next year.

3. Graceland North: The Antignani Estate Sale (Nov. 4)

The true tale of mystery couple Arthur and Alfreda Antignani proved to be a big draw for those, like The Orbit, that first discovered them via the over-the-top posthumous sale of their North Hills estate. The Antignanis lived large–and loud–in a shag-carpeted, gilt, mirrored, leopard printed, tchotchke-bedecked, and go-go mannequin-inhabited Bacchanalian suburban pleasure palace that would have made Elvis blush. Take a last look here.

4. Allegheny Cemetery: The Shark Grave (Feb. 6)

A tip for our fellow bloggers: if you want to up your visitor rate, start posting about something you can legitimately tag with #jaws or #sharkweek. The story of Lester C. “The Shark Grave” Madden’s Jaws-shaped grave marker turned into a feeding frenzy for the “fin freaks” who ate up this story like a great white hopped-up on chum, eyeing a bonfire’s worth of Martha’s Vineyard teenagers. And just like big teeth, they never seem to get enough (and ol’ Quint ain’t around stick ’em this time).

5. Unread: The Record Label Next Door (Sept. 2)

Chris Fischer has been pressing the Record and Play buttons while cassette spools roll and mailing the results out in manilla envelopes for a couple decades now (he started young). Along the way, he’s encouraged, promoted, and influenced a generation of guitar-wielding scratchy folk…like…ish lads and lasses to lay their souls down on magnetic tape and black plastic. We sat down with him and talked about Unread Records’ epic recent Public Coffin release.

6. Step Beat: Romeo & Frazier (May 17)

More city steps! The intersection of Romeo and Frazier Streets in South Oakland features a street lamp, road signs, two sets of city steps, and a whole bunch of trees, vines, and weeds (but no cars). The Orbit opines on the nature of what makes a “street,” the changing utility and value of city steps, and casts some serious aspersions on how much rope may be skipped at a house with Tibetan prayer flags hanging on the front porch.

7. Nun of the Above: Corita Kent at The Warhol (Feb. 26)

Sister Corita Kent, the radical art nun whose big tent quasi-religious messages questioning war and materialism via pop-art product manipulation and screen printing has very little to do with Pittsburgh except that The Andy Warhol Museum hosted an absolutely terrific career-spanning show of her work early in the year. We checked it out on the opening night, raved about it, and (we can only assume) The Warhol’s re-postings ended up sending a lot of people into Orbit.

8. An Orbit Obit: Where the Buffalo Roamed (Dec. 2)

This summer, Jeremy Reymer painted a series of buffalos on the sidewalks around the front and side of his Lawrenceville home. Before we could even run a story about the proud creatures, they were gone with the power-washing force of the city’s Graffiti Busters unit. This Orbit obit laments the loss of this fine collection of street art and muses about why the neighbors would have been offended enough to call it in, as well as the not so simple philosophical question what is graffiti?

9. A Wooden Street! (Aug. 30)

That’s pretty much what this one is about: the very rare sight of a street made entirely of wooden blocks (plus us winging about having been scooped by local public radio). It’s the last wooden street in Pittsburgh and one of the last handful in the United States. Roslyn Place is also right off Ellsworth Ave. in Shadyside. So, if you’re like this blogger, you’ve probably been within feet of it (or, at least, driven past it) many times without ever knowing it was there or stopping to check it out. Here’s another chance to make that right.

10. A Tiny Castle in the Strip District (May 22)

One tiny red castle, complete with a helipad and Mexican flag, mounted high on a brick wall in an alley in The Strip District. We’re not sure what it’s about or who came up with it, but a whole lot of people e-stopped by to check it out. It’s still there (although predictably weathered since this story ran in May), so, you know, get down there and check it out while you can.

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Check back on Wednesday for The Orbit’s 2015 year-in-review, part 2: “The Sleepers.”