Another American Adventure: Pittsburgh neighborhoods

Monday, August 16, 2010

Pittsburgh neighborhoods

John and I still get quite lost when we go into Pittsburgh, and end up meandering through neighborhoods like this. That was a Ukrainian Church on the right, and a Byzantine on the left.

Update: The Church on the left is the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church, where the funeral of Andy Warhol took place in February, 1987. I remember telling John as we passed: "You don't see Churches named after the "Holy Ghost" much, mostly they like to call them after the Holy Spirit." The next week when we visited the Andy Warhol Museum, I saw that Andy's funeral took place here at this Church of the Holy Ghost.

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.