Pittsburgh

 Annamaria on Jeffrey’s Turf

This past Wednesday, I flew to Jeff’s hometown as part of a museum tour group.  I came to this place with mixed emotions. There is so much beautiful art and architecture to admire in Pittsburgh, and I did. On the other hand, I am the granddaughter of a coalminer in western Pennsylvania who died of black-lung and left behind my nine-year-old father and his siblings, ranging in age from 14 to 2 years.  My widowed grandmother and her children were immediately evicted from the house she lived in, because there was no longer a miner living there. My anger about the resultant pain and deprivation that plagued my father’s young life cast a pall over my enjoyment of the trip.  I saw many manifestations of the wealth that people like my grandfather died producing.    As with many other places, many of Pittsburgh's historic glories were made on the backs of poor immigrant labor.

That said, I found Pittsburgh to be an interesting place with many wonderful things to see and experience.  Here is a photo record of them.

I loved the bridges:

The Carnegie Museum:

This was in a collection of self-portraits.  If I could have thought of it and 

painted it, it could have been mine!

The Statue of George Washing and Seneca Leader Guyasuta:

George was a twenty-one year old British officer during the French and Indian War.

St. Nicholas Croatian Church:

This artist painted murals that were at once deeply religious and 

an Indictment of the treatment of immigrants who died in factories

and were used as cannon fodder in war,

Rivers of Steel, the Carrie Blast Furnace Site:

This was my absolute favorite of the places we visited—fascinating, marvelous to photograph, and replete with history of the the otherwise forgotten workers who made America possible.  That’s it behind me in the selfie photo at the top of this post.  At the beginning of the 20th century this installation fed a river of molten iron to the steel mills across the river.  Today is it a place where people learn about its history, artists decorate it and also cast their sculptures in iron and aluminum.

An artist melting aluminum to pour into his molds

Now I am happy to be home!