More Golden Babies! [or] A Golden Baby Boom!

January 31, 20163 Comments

Golden baby hanging from power lines, Pittsburgh, PA

Off-kilter: Golden Baby #3 (aka “Butler Baby”)

It started innocently enough. That is, if a baby doll, its flesh painted gold and wearing a white onesie, suspended by a wire on its ankle and dangling upside down from a set of power lines counts as “innocent.” A couple weeks ago The Orbit spotted golden baby #1 near the corner of Penn and Main Streets, roughly in front of Constellation Coffee in Lawrenceville. We wrote about our amused and bemused impressions of it in these very annals. It was a fun little piece of street art (?) or possibly a goofy prank (??)–maybe a little bit of both–but that seemed like the last we’d hear from the golden dangling baby.

Then the tips started rolling in. First, reader Meredith reported a second golden baby, strung in the same manner, farther up Penn Avenue, at the corner of Winebiddle Street–she even included a photo. Another golden baby? we thought–we hoped–we fantasized. Where there’s two, there’s got to be more! Everyone knows that golden babies don’t arrive in pairs!

Golden baby hanging from power line, Pittsburgh, PA

Look out below: Golden Baby #2 (aka “Winebiddle Baby”)

As a gloomy daylight broke over that first post-tip Saturday, this blogger took the bicycle on a chilly mission to cruise Penn Avenue in search of other babies–golden or otherwise. From 40th Street all the way to East Liberty we went–slowly, block-by-block, eyes in the wires–scanning for lofty abandoned newborns. Stop honking you jagoffs! I’m reporting here! We found the little lost soul Meredith had tipped us to and snapped some pictures, but that was it. Otherwise: bupkis.

This one had a marked difference from Constellation Baby, though. Not in appearance–the size, shape, gold paint, white onesie–heck, even the unclipped tag–were identical. No, Winebiddle Baby just looked a lot easier to install. First of all, he’s mere feet from the second-floor fire escape of the brick building on Penn. Anyone with access could easily hang this baby right off the landing. Second, the power line is much closer to the ground than Constellation Baby’s. The perpetrator didn’t even have to get up on the fire escape–he or she could have just stood on the roof of a car–or set up a stepladder–to reach the low wire.

Golden baby hanging from power line near brick building with fire escape, Pittsburgh, PA

Winebiddle Baby [note the easy access from the fire escape]

Two golden babies found, but the trail had gone cold. That is, until we happened to run into reader John one cold morning on the 93A heading to Oakland. Imagine this blogger’s eyeballs ka-boinging out of their sockets as John casually dropped the news “you know there’s another one of those golden babies down on Butler Street, right?”

No, John, we didn’t! And it’s lucky it snowed or my ass would have been on the shoe leather express frustrated that only two golden babies have been found instead of riding this bus talking to you! This is why tip lines exist!

Hang in there, Butler Baby!

John’s willingness to come forward with evidence may be suspect, but his information is spot-on. Right there, in the wires above the 5300 block of Butler, dangles golden baby #3–and what a beauty she is! Glistening in an impossibly perfect deep blue January sky, gracefully spinning in the softest of breezes, Butler Baby is at peace with the world. Content to let the afternoon sunlight illuminate her golden skin, impervious to the cold weather, she’s lifted, weightless, and totally blissed-out. If only she’d let us know if–and where–she has more golden siblings similarly drifting through the ether.

A Fine Time for the Skyline

January 27, 2016April 3, 20162 Comments

Mural painted on garage door of man on motorcycle with the Pittsburgh skyline behind him and a banner reading "Gone but not Forgotten"

Gone but not forgotten, Homewood

Is the Pittsburgh skyline that distinct? This blogger wouldn’t have thought so, but it kept turning up, rendered by hand, in a variety of locales. The image is an interesting choice, especially for some obvious small time players. It’s there on a shuttered candy shop, a no-longer-serving Chinese restaurant, and a tribute to a fallen motorcyclist. [Note to self: cancel appointment to have Pittsburgh skyline tattooed across midriff.]

The iconography seems well established. Each representation features PPG’s signature spiked towers, the giant hypodermic needle that locates Fifth Avenue Place, and the taller-than-them-all monolith of the USX (née U.S. Steel) tower. Optional other inclusions are the fountain at Point State Park, the Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne bridges, Oxford Centre’s very ’80s lopped cube, and the Kopper’s/Gulf Tower art deco two-fer.

Mural of a spirit blowing glass above the Pittsburgh skyline at Gallery G Glass, Pittsburgh, PA

Gallery G Glass, Bloomfield

The loose outline of a great glass-blowing water spirit floats weightlessly in front of a rough depiction of downtown’s tall buildings. It looks like Matisse, as rendered by a precocious fifth-grader. This lanky figure seems to spring from a Smurfs-like version of the Point State Park fountain. Earth, air, fire, and water: all the elements are there. The mural pictured here is actually just one half of a set–its nearly-identical twin faces the other direction and sits just on the other side of Gallery G’s front entryway on Liberty Ave.

Cutty’s Candy Store, Homewood

We loved this combination Pittsburgh portrait/ornate Steelers tribute/Candy Store business sign so much we ganked it for the Orbit masthead. The skyline has all the usual players, but here they’re rendered in a really effective semi-detailed black & white, resting on a set of rococo brass work, and reading brilliantly against the pitch black background. Maybe if Cutty had made the text as easy to read the candy store would still be in business and we could have popped in for some licorice on the ride. That was not to be.

mural of the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh painted on brick wall of former Yen's Gourmet restaurant, Pittsburgh, PA

Yen’s Gourmet (detail), East Liberty

We’re gathering the materials on the inevitable Orbit obit to Yen’s Gourmet (R.I.P.) on Penn Avenue and this one popped-out. The long brick wall that makes up the east-facing side of the building has one continuous mural of a congenial, multicultural East Liberty. Bathed in sunshine, people of all stripes walk the streets, curb their pets, shop, and frolic. There is at least one incongruous wolf (maybe it’s just a husky) with its eyes trained on you, the viewer and its tongue salivating. It is both painful and totally fitting that this portrait will never include the greatest elements of change in a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood that would ultimately send Yen and his $6.95 all-you-can-eat buffet packing*. Likely the new Ace Hotel does not have such a deal.

Chromos Eyewear sign of a large pair of glasses, with the Pittsburgh skyline in each lens

Chromos Eyewear, Lawrenceville

This is almost certainly the newest skyline around as Chromos only took up shop in Lawrenceville’s tenth ward fairly recently–but how great to keep up the tradition and what an effective use of the idiom! One giant pair of glasses serving as this eyewear shop’s name-free shingle, each with a silhouetted downtown Pittsburgh skyline clearly in view. Real glass allows daylight through the rest of the lenses just like, you know, real glasses. Well done, Chromos.

* Just guessing here: we have no idea why Yen’s Gourmet closed their doors.

The French Fry Sculpture: John Raymond Henry’s “Pittsburgh” (in snow)

January 24, 2016January 26, 20181 Comment

John Raymond Henry "Pittsburgh" sculpture (aka "The French Fry sculpture") in snow, Frank Curto Park, Pittsburgh, PA

John Raymond Henry’s “Pittsburgh” (aka “The French Fry sculpture”), Frank Curto Park, Polish Hill

To call reaching the awkward Frank Curto Park–on foot, in the snow–a “slog” makes every other legitimate slog seem like mere inconvenience. It’s just two miles from home, but the ascent of the Bloomfield Bridge, up and down through slick Polish Hill back streets, and then the final unpleasant half mile hike along busy Bigelow Boulevard on an uncleaned roadside walkway deserves its own taxonomy for journalistic hardship.

But we’ve had this one on the Orbit‘s big list for some time–and you don’t mess with a blogger’s list! French Fry Sculpture in snow the item reads and that’s what we were after. With this weekend’s first legitimate whitening coinciding with a gloriously obligation-free Saturday, well, the die was cast. We booted-up and made the super slog.

Officially titled Pittsburgh, John Raymond Henry‘s giant public art piece is more commonly referred to by locals as “The French Fry Sculpture.” That’s clearly a bit of gentle fun-making, but it’s not undeserved. Aside from the zip code it happens to reside in–and possibly the Aztec gold that echoes the color of the “three sisters” bridges (and others) downtown–there’s just not that much that cries out as any reference point to our fair city.

On the other hand, the long squared-off yellow pieces collide in a cattywampus pile as if tossed directly from roiling oil bath to serving tray by a giant. These can’t help but abstractly resemble a certain delicious deep-fried side dish this city takes with perverse seriousness. Pittsburgh: you’ve been rebranded.

According to PittsburghArtPlaces.org, Pittsburgh (the objet d’art) was “created as part of the 1977 Three Rivers Arts Festival Sculpturescape program. The work originally resided at the University of Pittsburgh near the Hillman Library” [before moving to Frank Curto Park the following year].^[1]

The piece is very much of its time–and maybe that’s no coincidence. Henry seems to have in part defined that time as he was something a big name in the big public art world for a couple decades, starting in the 1970s. The artist has several dozen such “monumental sculptures” in public parks from Miami to Salt Lake, Washington, D.C. to Sioux City. Why, if you’re a second- or third-tier urban center without “a Henry,” you’ve probably got a lonely patch of grass and some bored public works crews.

The Orbit remains undecided. The piece has been well-maintained by its owners (the city), but that’s not to say it’s aged gracefully. It has a certain generic modern public art feel and a clumsy scheme that makes one all too aware of its joints. Looking at Henry’s other works (similar in aesthetics and scale, but often more visually successful) this one just feels like it doesn’t hit.

That said, as a blast of high-saturation yellow, it reads well against the lush green of the park in the warmer months, and still pops when surrounded by white snow and bare trees, as we see here. It’s something you can appreciate whizzing by in a car on Bigelow (probably the way most Pittsburghers have experienced it) and still rewards actually stopping in the park and giving it a walk-around. And hell, who doesn’t like french fries?

Note: There ended being a lot more to talk about here than we first expected, including our harrowing egress from the park and the obvious questions Who was Frank Curto? What’s up with this “park” that no one can get to? and What about the wild turkeys that hang out there? It also turns out the space has a number of other public artworks, as well as a art garden project–you just wouldn’t catch any of this through the windshield. We’re going to save all these for a future Orbit story.

Sources:
[1] Pittsburgh Art Places entry for Pittsburgh: http://pittsburghartplaces.org/accounts/view/628
[2] Frank Curto Park wiki entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Curto
[3] John Raymond Henry website: http://johnhenrysculptor.com/

Reflections On A Hundred

January 20, 20161 Comment

St. Paul's Cathedral in Pittsburgh reflected in mirrored glass

St. Paul’s Cathedral, Oakland

A hundred! One whole century! What a very round integer!

Yes, today Pittsburgh Orbit trips the old blogometer into three digit land. It all happened in just under one calendar year. We promise to not make a big deal about that date too, but in lieu of any real story today, we’ll take this rare opportunity to reflect on a year in the blogosphere and The Orbit‘s one hundred tiny episodes so far.

reflection of small shops on Craig Street in large glass windows, Pittsburgh, PA

Craig Street, Oakland

Why blog? Frankly, it’s not something this majority introvert ever really considered. The “me me me“-ness of so much blogging is nauseating at best and just plain pathetic (much of) the rest of the time. And what hasn’t already been covered? The answer, it turns out, is a lot. But, you know, a suggestion here, an idea there–next thing we know, we’re up and blogging.

Plus, it’s fun! Roll together a bunch of things we already loved to do (bicycle, hike, explore, take photographs, drink beer, find out about other people, write) and wrap those experiences up in little easy-to-chew bite-sized chunks. It’s a tremendous regular creative prompt and get-out-the-door keister-kicker. We recommend it!

Former Mellon National Bank, Downtown

Who reads this stuff? A good question! The stats tell us there are site visitors from all around the world, but mainly from the U.S. and Canada (and we imagine most of those are current or former Pittsburghers). Apparently they get here from umpteen different means–social media, Reddit discussions, search engines, email lists, etc.

We’ve gotten a lot of really nice feedback from friends and site visitors, but it’s been most rewarding to connect with the various outside groups, each scratching their own funny itches. Pittsburgh’s bike and pedestrian community seems to check in on the city steps stories, there’s a devoted crew of ghost sign hunters over in the U.K., the street art folks are kept in ready supply, everybody likes to read about their friends, and just about anyone who came across them seems to love the Antignanis. Oh, and every single day someone comes in looking for Jaws.

Market Square, Downtown

Regrets? Yeah, this blogger has a few! For a fellow as music-obsessed as this one, we’ve barely touched the category. We’re also starving for some more food and drink stories (the weird pizza series, notwithstanding). We’ve barely touched the South Hills, the hilltops, and still haven’t made it to Duck Hollow or Fairywood. And gosh darnit, if we’re left without being able to interview Bill Bored about the Cardboards, then this whole thing has been a waste of everybody’s time. (I suppose it won’t have been a waste of Bill Bored’s time.)

University of Pittsburgh building reflected in glass windows

University of Pittsburgh, Oakland

There are also a ton of things that would have made great Orbit obits but either disappeared before we started writing, or we were in the wrong place at the right time, or just couldn’t have done them justice: the old Nickel Bingo Parlor, Chiodo’s–its decades of dangling undergarments and its “mystery sandwich”–(former) White Towers, The Suburban Lounge and their house band The Casual Approach, St. Nicholas Church grotto–ah, hell, the list goes on and on. In any case: forgive us–we’re doing our best. Sigh.

Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh reflected in glass windows

Mellon Institute, Oakland

What’s next? Honestly, the eternal tap of great ideas has run from a gushing main to more of a babbling brook–but it’s still flowing! Maybe this blogger just needs to get up off the thinkin’ chair and put his nose to the grindstone. That said, we’ve got some fun stuff planned around Lent, springtime, weird sports, fried fish, wacky artists, a hunt for the elusive paw-paw, and of course, Cemetober. Keep that Internet web browser dialed-in right here, folks.

Oliver Ave., Downtown

An Orbit Obit: Squirrel Hill’s Double Ghost

January 17, 2016Leave a comment

Ghost building with a ghost sign for Approved Lubrication, Pittsburgh, PA

Before: the Approved Lubrication ghost building/ghost sign where Poli used to be, Squirrel Hill (October, 2015)

What a bummer! Whatabummer, (and even) WHAT. A. BUMMER. Squirrel Hill: you really let this one get away–and don’t tell us The Orbit wasn’t there to warn you! In less time than Cop Rock was on the air, we managed to both take flight and burn our wings on the heat of the sun.

As detailed in an Orbit story from October, the tragic fire that destroyed the former Poli restaurant, as well as the building next door, had the miraculous silver lining of exposing not one, but two pretty terrific visual artifacts of previous times, one right on top of the other.

First, there was as crisp and clean an outline of a one-story ghost house (possibly ghost kitchen or ghost retail?) as we’ve ever seen. Then, under that, was a faint, but still appreciable ghost sign that some sleuthing revealed as an advertisement for Approved Lubrication, likely from the 1930s or ’40s.

blank wall painted over to cover former ghost house and ghost sign at the site of the former Poli Restaurant, Pittsburgh, PA

After: well done, guys (January, 2016)

Sigh. It was, of course, too good to last. By December, whoever owns this lot–or maybe the owner of the big former factory building behind it–decided to send the painting squad out to make sure the entire surface would be devoid of any soul and this cultural history banished from the earth. Mission accomplished.

The genius that picked the Home Depot mens room taupe for the paint color should be given some kind of award. Not only did you rip all the character and history off the wall with a couple cans of exterior enamel, you erased the whole thing with the visual shorthand for bland. Maybe you can get Dockers or Applebee’s to build a franchise on the lot. Well done.

former Poli Restaurant parking sign, Pittsburgh, PA

The (other) last sign of Poli

Now, this blogger has never advocated illegal activity–certainly not vandalism or destruction of private property. But if ever there was a blank surface that was calling–nay, crying–out for some spray paint-wielding bomb squad to enrich the local cultural landscape, this is it. There are forty or fifty feet of clean, unobstructed wall, the prime Murray-meets-Forward five-way intersection, where captive audiences have nothing better to do than check out your work, and an aesthetic and history-erasing wrong to right. The Orbit is, in the parlance of the times, “just sayin'”.

Lot where Poli Restaurant used to be, Pittsburgh, PA

In context: the former Poli lot, all cleaned-up, Squirrel Hill

Golden Dangling Baby!

January 13, 2016January 28, 20165 Comments

The vigilant blogger must learn to look for inspiration anywhere and everywhere. These stories don’t grow on trees! [Well, actually they might grow on trees.] Maybe Mayor Peduto has enough clout to order the D.P.W. into creating brilliant street art, but The Orbit has yet to wield that kind of influence. Until then, we’re at the mercy of fate, jonesing for goofballs, and always on the lookout for the next score.

And indeed it was fate–an extra cold morning (too cold for the bicycle), a missed bus, a re-routed walk to work–that led this blogger to receive what we’re considering a kind of divine inspiration. Yes, at the moment when we needed it most–mere hours (err…a couple days) before deadline–today’s story literally fell out of the sky at us in the form of one suspended baby doll, dangling by his right foot from the telephone wires along Penn Avenue.

We’ve seen a lot of things hanging from wires in our day–banners and debris, vines and living creatures, and of course the ubiquitous pairs of sneakers–laced, eulogized, and interred in the sky as a final loving tribute. But until now, Pittsburgh Orbit has never encountered a dangling (falling? flying?) baby doll high in the utility infrastructure. This one is new to us.

Though not parents ourselves*, hanging the next generation from telephone wires may be understandable–hell, there might still be time to string up the Millennials! In any case, it’s a questionable form of child care for a newborn and likely not recommended by “real” parents.

How the baby doll got up on those wires is a mystery. Getting a laced pair of sneakers up there seems like a simple enough task–you stand on the sidewalk and keep throwing them over head until they catch. But this baby doesn’t have any counter-balance, no obvious hook to snare the electric line on the trip up. That, and these wires are a good twenty feet in the air and not terribly near any windows on the Penn Ave. buildings. How did it get here?

There is one more interesting tidbit. Though it is not at all apparent in these backlit morning light photographs, the baby has had its flesh painted gold (you’ll have to take The Orbit‘s word for this–or better yet, go see for yourself). This should allay any possible suspicions that the baby reached the overhead wires of natural causes. Uh-uh. Not buying it. This card-carrying amateur detective wanna-be knows the work of someone on the prankster-street art continuum when he’s standing under it…and he likes what he sees.

To you, Golden Baby Dangler (whoever you are), thank you for making one blogger’s day.

* That we know of

A Toast to the Host of a Double-Ghost in Glassport

January 10, 2016Leave a comment

These don’t come along every day. Oh sure, The Orbit has covered its share of ghost signs–we see them all over the place. But this long brick wall along the side of a retail space facing a vacant lot in Glassport is something special.

First, it’s got this absolutely terrific disembodied left hand. Its index finger is fully pointing that way. The fingernails are in need of a trim, but still well-groomed–this is not the hand of a working (wo)man. The pointer’s shirt cuffs are linked under the arm of a what must be one spectacular red suit jacket–this blogger imagines it’s crushed velvet (but he would). The painting has to be six or seven feet wide.

That’s great, but what makes this ghost sign really unique among its faded brethren is the weird multi-layered levels of advertising that have survived and outlasted their respective backgrounds. The effect is one that makes the wall look like a giant test sheet for a print run, or of a very Radar magazine/Photoshop-era layer-through-layer effect, because we can.

layers of ghost signs on brick wall, Glassport, PA

Mother’s Bread 100% Pure / Ward’s Bread

Back then–whenever then was–the sign painters couldn’t (or wouldn’t) have executed anything like this on purpose. But with the hindsight of a couple dozen decades of modern art and graphic design, we can’t help but think how incredibly “of today” these just happened to end up looking.

The fantastic way the layered letters blur and melt into one another, the ghost-within-ghost mutations of form, the collision of type faces, the barely readable text–it all looks like a grand version of something you’d see silk-screened and framed on an Unblurred Friday night. Hell, you could turn these into t-shirts and sell them for twenty bucks to the indie craft crowd–nobody would bat an eye.

And thus, Little Orbit Kitty Fashion Productions was born.

The Real Kind! / Made for Practical People!

Un-Graffiti: No Parking! (Part 1)

January 6, 2016Leave a comment

white brick wall with "NO PARKING" painted in red, Pittsburgh, PA

NO PARKING, Oakland

Parking, man. People get so damn worked-up about it.

When first The Orbit introduced the notion of “un-graffiti” some most-of-a-year-ago, it wasn’t clear there’d be much more to that particular story. How wrong we were! As it turned out, over and over again we were seeing not just more examples of the form, but the very particular one of business owners taking the law into their own hands with D.I.Y. graffiti-style No Parking signs. We have so many of these that our hard drive overfloweth with this particular bounty. Here we bring you just the cream of this particular crop…so far.

brick wall with message "Theatre. Quiet please. No parking." painted, Downtown Pittsburgh

THEATRE QUIET PLEASE *NO PARKING*, Downtown

In our digital-age interpretation of ALL CAPS as text-based shouting, the QUIET PLEASE portion of this particular message comes as a humorous incongruity. I believe the “theatre” location is actually still valid (either Harris or Arcade Comedy? It’s somewhere near the back/alley side of those two) though I imagine this sign predates the modern use of the space. The different color paint, elongated verticals, and general sloppiness of the NO PARKING half of the message suggest it was appended at some point after the initial job.

corrugated metal doors with hand-painted no parking message

DOORWAY DON’T BLOCK! No parking, Strip District

This blogger is sitting on a ton of pictures taken around the set of corrugated metal warehouses in the 3100 block of Penn and Liberty in The Strip. They just always look great and get such terrific weird light sneaking in over The Hill and down through the canyon between the tight buildings on either side of the Spring Way alley. What we’ll do with those, who knows? But there happens to be one qualifying no parking entry here, this with the re-phrase DOORWAY DON’T BLOCK–the no parking a mere afterthought.

NO PARKING, Lawrenceville

Why is the NO only one brick high, but PARKING gets two? The directness (literally) of the arrow is so great…and specific. “Is it just right here? Is it OK if I park over there?” Whatever the explanation, it’s clear the owner of this property on Cabinet Way in Lawrenceville (a church school, rather than a home, if memory serves) doesn’t want to ask too much. Give the lord this one spot; do what you want anywhere else.

garage door spray painted with "Please. No parking in front of garage. Thank you."

Please. No parking in front of garage. Thank you. Lawrenceville

The most courteous no parking sign you’ll likely find. The message is written in a friendly cursive, includes an abstracted flower (?) decoration, and is bookended with both “Please” and “Thank you.” It makes this blogger almost want to abandon a car here, just to meet these nice folks.

brick walk with no parking message painted

NO PARKING ON SIDEWALK, North Side

Found on an alley in central North Side, this example is so perfect it looks like a film set. The worn red brick wall, the steel bars on the blocked-out windows, and the perfectly-painted (stenciled?) NO PARKING ON SIDEWALK that’s likely fifty or sixty years old (?) are all…just so. You could line up the Sharks and Jets or Pink Ladies and greasers in front of this backdrop and have a right proper switchblade-slinging bubblegum-popping sing-and-dance off. Cue: Vinnie Barbarino–this time we’re racing for pinks. Wop-de-wop, shoo-bop de-doobie-do.

*NO* PARKING at any time, Glassport

Another old sign so quaintly precious it’s hard to believe. This one has the bonus keystone-shaped Official [unreadable] ghost sign above it (probably a former Pennsylvania state inspection station?). The no-nonsense *NO PARKING* followed by the sweet lower-case at any time have a nice good cop/bad cop duality that seems to come from another time–don’t park here, but we still like you. Come back for an inspection and maybe an oil change…at any time.

NO PARKING PIZZA ONLY … — OR TOWED at your own risk! Homestead

An embarrassment of riches…or at least messages. Is it “no parking” or “parking pizza only”? Why is there both an ellipsis and an m-dash? How can you be “towed at your own risk!”?Regardless of any lapses in pre-paint proof-reading (err…proof-thinking-through), it’s pretty obvious Di Sallas Pizza in Homestead would like you to pick up your pie and get the hell out–you can leave the motor running. The glowing online testimonials suggest the Di Sallas spent more time in the kitchen than either art or English class and we should come back to cover this place for The Pizza Chase–we’ll just watch where we park.

hand-painted sign on cement wall reading "Parking only Dollar Store and More"

PARKING ONLY DOLLAR STORE AND MORE, Forest Hills

Weed and See: The “Adjutant” Murals and Riverwalk Cleanup

January 3, 2016Leave a comment

They leapt right out, wheels in full motion, from a bicycle seat all the way across the river. There, beneath the on-ramp to the Fort Duquesne Bridge, along the thick concrete barrier walls by Gateway Center, stretches a new(ish) blocks-long mural (or series of murals, whichever way you see it). Even from a significant distance and shaded by the ramp structure above, the painting reads as a great collection of wild flora. It begged for further investigation so we legged it up over the bridge, around the park, and down to the river’s edge.

View of downtown Pittsburgh and the Allegheny River from the North Side with Adjutant murals visible under the Fort Duquesne Bridge ramp

In context: the new river walk murals, under the Fort Duquesne Bridge ramp, from the North Shore

Pittsburgh Orbit has spilled its share of virtual ink looking backwards. We’ve devoted an entire series of “Orbit obits” to things that aren’t there any more and when you fetishize ghost houses and ghost signs and graffiti as much as we do, well, you’re not really thinking about your future.

So we thought we’d start 2016 off right with a fresh-faced forward-looking story on something new to us and nearly brand new to Pittsburgh: this terrific blocks-long series of murals decorating the Allegheny side of the downtown riverwalk.

The murals are actually half a year old at this point, making this blogger wonder where the hell was I? Though he’s bragging about eagle-eying the paintings on this ride, he had to have been down this stretch of riverbank dozens of times without ever seeing them, nor did we catch any coverage in the local news last summer. So let this post be another reminder to get out there and keep the peepers scanning!

Though entirely uncredited at the site (as far as I could tell), The Orbit can Google with the best of them. The giant piece is the vision of artist Kim Beck and titled Adjutant (a fancy word pulled from a Henry David Thoreau quote). A team of some 150 volunteers organized by Riverlife Pittsburgh executed the work during the Three Rivers Arts Festival last June. Two blog posts on the Riverlife site give all the pertinent background and details [see links below].

If you ever used this section of the riverwalk–the stretch that runs between the northeast corner of Point State Park and the slender Allegheny Riverfront Park that picks up around the Clemente (née Sixth Street) Bridge–you don’t likely remember it for its charms. The passageway was perfectly utile and never felt dangerous (at least in daylight), but walking or bicycling through always seemed like traveling where one wasn’t supposed to–fairly lawless and designed to dock giant barges, not facilitate pedestrian traffic. Corners under the bridge often contained the sleeping bags, tarps, and cardboard boxes of the population that lived down there. Discarded liquor bottles, beer cans, and snack wrappers pointed to late night boozers and early morning fishermen who hung out under its private, protected shelter.

So the project to create the 850-foot (approximately three to four city blocks) mural is both a very welcome beautification of an extremely cold, hard, and dark urban space and also seems to be a wholesale cleanup effort to make the passageway a truly inviting link between the parks on either end.

Not only was this stretch scrubbed for the mural’s creation during the arts festival, but it amazingly seems to have stayed that way some six months on. The pedestrian section of the walk is remarkably litter-free and either Pittsburgh’s taggers have decided to leave these walls alone or the city’s graffiti removal crew does spot-on repair work (I’d bank on the former).

That’s all great, but “cleaning up” part of a city is always a loaded term–especially when it involves human beings. As nice and inviting as the new space is, we can’t help but think about those who were displaced (we assume?) in its transition. We’ve noticed homeless camps pushing farther out from town in a way that suggests you have to go that far to not get hassled by the man. We inadvertently ran into one such group in the Christmas Under the Bridge piece a couple weeks back.

The murals are large-scale depictions of common weeds that appear along Pittsburgh’s riverbanks, rendered in the lean palette of black, white, and a couple shades of gray. Artist Kim Beck informed us that the palette was dictated by the commissioning agency. They look great, but we can’t help but think the addition of some real color would warm the space up considerably and “pop” dramatically against the drab surroundings. That said, we’ll take what we can get, and this is a big improvement on the visual space.

Pittsburgh Orbit’s Pennsylvania wildlife consultant and resident deep woodsman Tim Tomon came down from the trees long enough to identify dandelion, goldenrod, mulberry, pearly everlasting, thistle, wild peppergrass, and wood sorrel among the silhouetted weeds.

Beck’s re-casting of weeds as giant expressions of beauty is certainly an exciting and inviting vision for this just-recently prettified stretch of town. The bright green of the real weeds that peek out from the cracks between foot surface and retaining wall are the only elements of color one sees (save for the bright yellow bridge deck above). Both serve as sweet reminders that a “weed” is purely a situational notion. These all look pretty good to me.

Sources/more info:

“Mayor Peduto, Riverlife announce public art project for downtown riverfront”, Riverlife Pittsburgh, http://www.riverlifepgh.org/blog/mayor_peduto_riverlife_announce_public_art_project_for_downtown_riverfront/
“Watch the #TBD mural grow under the Fort Duquesne Bridge”, Riverlife Pittsburgh, http://www.riverlifepgh.org/blog/watch_the_tbd_mural_grow_under_the_fort_duquesne_bridge/

The Orbit 2015 Year-in-Review, Part 2: The Sleepers

December 23, 20151 Comment

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.