we came to Pittsburgh for a little sun

Pittsburgh is not known by many people who haven't been there for its beauty. This is because they haven't been there.

I came to bring Lauren and show her this lovely place that stole my heart away when I first started graduate school at Duquesne. And today has been a rare day in the city - 75 degrees, sunny, perfectly blue skies. I've actually gotten a sunburn today, driving around and walking around to visit. We saw...

the city skyline burst upon us as we exited the Fort Pitt Tunnel and began to cross the Fort Pitt Bridge (the glass castle thingy is the headquarters of Pittsburgh Plate Glass, designed by Philip Johnson, who also built the AT&T chippendale top thing in Manhattan),...

the first place I lived in, on Nantasket Street, on top of Greenfield hill, overlooking the Parkway East (but I took the picture vertically, and I can't get iPhoto to save it rotated properly)...

... the house on La Clair Avenue (or Street, depending who you ask or which sign you read), where I finished my dissertation in the second-floor flat, and where Lancelot first came into my life. This is in Regent Square, on the eastern edge of Frick Park, however, I also lived off the Norhtern edge of Frick Park...

... in the carriage house of the Card mansion, on Card Lane. Card was Henry Clay Frick (aka Frickin', or something much worse, a financial henchman of the robber barons whose extraction and production industries made them filthy rich and made the city what it was and is)'s man-who-does, and this place was part of Card's own mansion, a modest affair, three stories of stone...

We went to the East End Food Co-Op, where I spent a lot of time, and which has changed from a hippie quasi-collective natural food store into a fairly yuppie Whole Foods wannabe (I don't think there's anything wrong with Whole Foods, actually, but there had been a place for the Co-Op, and a battle over its future when I was around. It's plain who won). We then zipped back through Schenley Park again to drive circuits up and down the hills, and to see vistas like...

... this. Is your city this pretty? No, it's not. This is Pittsburgh.

Then we went to East Liberty, on up to Highland Park, back down to East Liberty, found that the government housing complex that had been built over a major roadway has finally been torn down, whence up to Lawrenceville, to go to...

...

yep, the Church Brew Works, which is in fact...

... a brewery built inside an old church. We drank samplers, then ate at Mallorca, a Spanish restaurant on the South Side I never thought I'd get to again. There, I overheard two extremely typical Pittsburgh conversations: explaining to someone why Pittsburgh is the greatest city. It's not quite apologizing, it's not quite defending, it's not quite civic pride. People here are used to Pittsburgh getting a bad rep, and they hate it. People I knew who lived here gave it a bad rep. It doesn't deserve it. It's historic, extremely livable, lovely, and even if a day like today is rare, they're better than anybody else's best days, at least I think so.

Anyway, we finally went up onto Mount Washington to take in the view from there at night, and with the flash off, my cheesy digital camera came up with this:

Ah well. That's the postcard picture you can get anywhere.

It felt good to be here, as it always did. I needed to recover some memories, and make new ones, and I did that.