A Day in Oakland

It was a drizzly day, not impossible to hike, but a little unpleasant.  Since we have a membership at the Carnegie museums, I decided to spend the day in the city instead, in the Oakland neighborhood, where a lot of the city's educational institutions are located.

I don't know which got the name first, the city of Oakland, California, or the neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh.  However, Pennsylvania has a storied history of putting its public universities in places with confusing names.  We've got an Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in the town of Indiana, and a California University of Pennsylvania, in the town of California.  Ah, but the gallery of the grand staircase at the Carnegie Museum is lovely and seemingly eternal.

The Hall of Architecture, unlike many of the other displays, has not changed a bit since I was a kid.  It's got the same statues, and doorways, and pulpits that it's always had.  The heavy facades of the same French and Italian churches stand in exactly the same spots.  The dinosaur display especially has changed a lot down through the years, probably as we've learned more about dinosaurs.  But the Hall of Architecture is immutable.  I think that's one of the reasons I find myself drawn back there time and again.  

Of course, every museum has its lame furniture displays.  If you ever get lost in the Met, in New York, you'll end up in early American furniture.  The furniture gallery at the Carnegie has annoyingly squeaky floors and a relatively uninteresting display, but the one redeeming factor is that it has big windows to let in the natural light--which was luminous and gray on this Thursday.  The beautiful Heinz Chapel can be seen through the glass.

Up close, Heinz Chapel looks like a rock on the Scottish coast.  Dark, jagged, imposing.

 On the inside, you could swear you'd walked through one of the fake facades in the Hall of Architecture.  It's got all the magnificent pretense of a European church.  And like a medieval church, the altar is at the east end.  The windows depict Christian saints but also historic figures who represent various virtues, like Galileo, Da Vinci, and Bronte.

This view faces west, toward the entrance, where a very eager hostess will push brochures and questions at anyone who enters.