The Power of a Place

 In the East End of the city, there is a second-floor room in one of the stately old townhouses; it's a place I think about when I'm not there, a place I visit as often as I can...which isn't very.  It used to be a bedroom, I'm sure, in a house of eight bedrooms.  But now it's a sitting room.  Its air alone has curative properties. 

Place is a powerful thing.  Some places have an ominous feel.  Some places make you feel sleepy, or edgy, or ponderous.  Only few places in this world truly make you feel that all will be well.  For me, this is one of them.

Construction Junction, Pittsburgh

 I'd always heard how cool Construction Junction is.  It's an architectural resale shop in the city's east end, the only place I know where you can find two large bins of newell posts just waiting to be purchased.

 Old office furniture?  Check!  Ergonomically incorrect swivel chairs?  Check!  Formica-topped booths with vinyl benches from old diners?  Check!

 You need rosettes for the doorways of your 18th century house?  Oh, they've got rosettes--or whatever they're called.

 There's wood paneling to go beneath a staircase.  And a mangle?  

My favorite object was the twenty-foot high iron monkey.  Very moving.

The Real Carnegie Hall

 So there are at least five "Carnegie Music Halls" in the United States.  The most famous one is in New York, of course.  But there are lesser ones in many of the larger towns where Andrew Carnegie (to soothe his aching conscience) constructed libraries.  In fact, his music halls are usually attached to his libraries.  That's the case in Pittsburgh, Homestead, Braddock, and in this place: Carnegie, PA.  This is the Carnegie Free Library and Carnegie Music Hall in Carnegie, PA...one of the many old industrial satellite cities of Pittsburgh.

If you go around to the side of the big library building, the Carnegie Music Hall has a separate entrance, pictured here.  I got into the library easily enough but couldn't get into the music hall.  However, I do know that it is still an active venue for the performing arts.  Online photos make the interior appear fairly humble, but it is cool that an old manufacturing borough like Carnegie got such an artistic and architectural gem.

 The library's collection is laughable: only two short aisles of non-fiction books, most of which are celebrity and political biographies.  The remainder of the collection is largely pop-fiction from the 1990s: Danielle Steele, Sue Grafton, John Grisham... And yet, the town of Carnegie is cool.  The once-fashionable part of town, including the library and music hall, is built on a hill overlooking the rest of the city.  The lawns around the library are parklike and command a good view when the leaves are off.  This is also a neighborhood of quiet, tree-lined streets and grand old houses.

 Click on this photo to see the two onion-domed churches in the distance, one gold and one blue.  Carnegie is one of those gritty old Western Pennsylvania boroughs that I used to dream about when I was exiled out west.  It's hilly with a nice little river running through it--Chartiers Creek.  It has lots of bridges and wooded hillsides too steep to build on.  It's got ornate old buildings and stately mansions in varying states of decay.  You can imagine being young here, with lots of places to hide, and smoke cigarettes, and meet up with friends.  I know their music is considerably older than I am, but places like this remind me of the sad ballads of Simon and Garfunkel.  "The Sound of Silence."  "The Boxer."  "I Am a Rock."  All of those songs seem to echo the sadness and antiquated beauty of places like this.

Also, like all of Pittsburgh's satellite cities, it's got train tracks.  The long, mournful cry of the trains would provide part of the soundtrack to your life in a place like Carnegie, not to mention the low rumbling of the trains' passing.  It would rattle windows and bring traffic to a halt.  I tried to hike today, but the woods just wasn't doing anything for me.  I'm not sure what's happening...

Downtown Churches, Pittsburgh

 Pittsburgh has a pretty cool downtown.  It's got three grandiose performance venues--Heinz Hall, the Benedum, and the Byham, not to mention numerous other theaters that are nice but less splendid, like the O'Reilly and the August Wilson.  The banks, and post offices, and train stations, and other public buildings all have airy, marble-pillared lobbies.  There are statues looking down from above and dark little parks tucked away between the Gothic facades of 19th century office buildings.  But one thing our downtown does not have in great number is grand churches.  This stands in contrast to most other Eastern cities.

 The city's Episcopal cathedral and its first Presbyterian church both date back to the 1750s, when the English took the Point from the French and established a town here.  Of course, the original buildings were small, and humble, and replaced long ago. One church was for the English; the other was for the Scots.  The churchyard between the two is the oldest in Pittsburgh.  This is the interior of the Episcopal cathedral.  It's nice enough, but dim and unremarkable.

 The two towers stand side by side, standing guard over a shared graveyard where homeless people sleep on the marble slabs that name the dead who sleep below.

 The Presbyterian church, shown below, is slightly more interesting, with its dark woodwork and two full galleries of Tiffany stained glass.  In both of these buildings, it makes all the difference in the world when a glimmer of sun makes its way between the skyscrapers and filters momentarily through the somber stained glass.  

 But Pittsburgh is one of those strange towns where the best public buildings are in the outlying neighborhoods, like Oakland, East Liberty, and Shadyside.  The big museums, the main library, and all the universities are two or three miles east of downtown.  The old mansions are out that direction, too--the handful that remains.  These business district churches have their charms, but their edifices are much smaller and less extravagant than their sister parishes in the East End of the city.

There were homeless people sleeping in the pews of both of these churches.  Stained glass saints preside over their slumber.  Strangely enough, both churches also decorate their naves with foreign flags.  What's that about?

The Andy Warhol Museum

 The woods didn't call to me to day, which seems strange.  I've been getting pretty good at meeting my psycho-spiritual needs without hiking, which I never even thought possible three years ago.  Instead, I wanted to go downtown to check out a used bookstore on Liberty Avenue.  Cool place.  But I had lots of time leftover to make my first visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, just across the Allegheny River on the North Side.  Warhol is a native son of Pittsburgh, though he never looked back after leaving for New York.  I often drive past the cemetery where he's buried in the "South Hills" of Pittsburgh.  Most people don't know about his grave, but truly, I think Warhol will be all but forgotten in two more generations.  He's just not a great artist.

No photography is allowed inside the Warhol except in the lobby, where the artist's funkadelic couch is on display.  No worries.  There's not much that's worth photographing.  Either Warhol's genius is wasted on me or else there's nothing to waste.  My guess is that Warhol was a hack who managed to attract attention to himself.  The museum is seven stories of silkscreened Campbell Soup cans.  They probably don't want you taking pictures because they don't want people going home and figuring out how easy it would be to counterfeit Warhol's work.  I wasn't particularly interested in photographing the guy's tattered and besmudged couch either, much less imagining the horrors it has seen.  

Honestly, I did like some of the stuff that's on display on the museum's seventh floor.  They keep his earliest art up there--paintings and drawings that he did as a kid before leaving Pittsburgh.  There's a painting of his family's living room that's very good, reminds me a little bit of Van Gogh.  But I think I saw all seven floors in a matter of thirty minutes.

"Cliffs Near Dieppe," by Claude Monet

I don't care if it is mostly baby-blue; it calls to me.  It's both troubled and serene at once.  It reminds me of the summer of 1990 when I found myself homeless on the beach in Northern France, living off the kindness of German tourists and one Franco-Arab immigrant girl from Egypt, who fed me and gave me a butter knife that I still have.  She said to me one day out of the blue, "Tu vas m'oublier."  And it's true.  I can't even remember her name.

Showcase of the Gods

I've been to Thailand, where slender Theravada-style Buddhas grace cities, and villages, and forest shrines, some of them plated in gold and standing several stories tall.  I've been to Hawaii, where stoic-looking Japanese Buddhas recline in splendid temples.  And yet, just today I came across the most beautiful Buddha statue I've ever seen.  This Buddha was probably crafted in the 3rd century CE in Pakistan, where all ancient Hindu and Buddhist statuary is now in danger of being destroyed by extremist Muslim iconoclasts.

 Because the weather today was miserable, gray and rainy, I decided not to go hiking and went alone to the Carnegie museums in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  It was so nice to look at the art exhibits without impatient children tugging at my sleeve.  I discovered whole rooms, and large displays, and in fact a whole wing to the art museum that I'd never had an opportunity to visit before...because I never went alone.  The newly-discovered "wing" was American furniture, so it didn't hold my attention for long, but whether it's in the forest or in a marble-halled museum, there's nothing like finding new places.  

I also had the occasion to linger longer over all the old medieval devotional art that wives and children cannot endure.  Seeing images of Jesus and the Buddha in near proximity always causes me to wonder.  I comprehend the ancient European wisdom of "Eostre," the understanding that light and life can only rise out of darkness and death, that everything good must come to an end, only to be born anew in fresh manifestations of wonder and power.  It's the parable of springtime.  I get that.  There's great beauty to it.  But it seems almost a shame that Western representations of divinity are so sorrowful.  In contrast, just look at that Pakistani Buddha.  So serene.  So imperturbable.  So damn virile.  Could it be that I have a little man-crush on the Buddha?

Hiking is always my drug of choice, but I've got to say that a rainy day wandering alone among statues and paintings is almost as good.  On the drive in, a girly of about 20 cut me off in traffic and stared at me arrogantly as she did it.  When she turned into the museum parking lot, I'm sure it creeped her out that I turned in right behind her.  She probably thought I was following her to avenge myself.  It turned out that she was an employee, and I loved the way she hid her face embarrassedly each time I walked past the little showcase that she was guarding.