Breathing new life into Pittsburgh

Asian Valley, originally uploaded by Scott Beveridge.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. – Artist Ian Thomas applies the final strokes Friday to his eye-catching large public mural, one of many that have appeared in recent years on buildings in the Pittsburgh area over the past few years.

His is titled “Urban Lung,” and it can be found on the side of an Asian market along Penn Avenue in the city’s Strip District, a Mecca for bargain prices on fresh produce and gourmet foods. Thomas, of Butler, Pa., said he came up with the idea for his interpretation of an Asian river valley by talking with the building owner and people who work or live in the area.

The murals are the brainchild of a nonprofit corporation, The Sprout Fund, which formed in 2001 to bring communities together to develop innovative projects in hopes of finding solutions to the problems that face the region.

I think the murals work great to add some beauty to areas of the city with blight and give folks something to think about while stuck in traffic on the many outdated roads in the region.

Click here to check out the six other new murals that went up this year.

Click here to take a look at those from previous years.

Here is one from a previous year by Lucas Stock further up Penn Avenue at The Midwife Center for Birth and Women's Health:

No contact here with the dead, for me anyhow

Judgement, originally uploaded by srinehuls.

POMFRET, NY – At the gated entrance to a village where people claim to converse with the dead, I reach for a $10 bill to pay the price of a day’s admission, eager to test the water and consult a medium.

The attendant smiles, hands me a guide to the unincorporated village of Lilly Dale in New York wine country and quickly opens it to a map of its streets.

“Have you been here before?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

“Well if you hurry, you can make it to the service at Inspiration Stump,” she says. “It starts in a few minutes. It’s something you don’t want to miss.”

Curious, I drive off, following a narrow lane only to be struck by a sudden uneasy loss of any sense of direction. The narrow roads, built for horse-drawn buggies in the 1800s, follow circular or oval paths unlike the orderly grid-pattern streets that can be found in most towns and cities in the United States.

I find a place ahead to park, grab the map and begin my journey to the mysterious tree stump in the woods.

The streets here are lined with impeccably maintained Victorian-era cottages on postage stamp-sized lots. Many of the houses have signs posted on their doors that indicate the medium who lives inside is either not home or has a booked schedule. There goes my shot at reaching out to my dearly departed great-aunt Blanche, who supposedly knew all the skeletons in the closets of my mom’s side of the family.

This oasis on Cassadaga Lake dates to 1879 and is supposed to be the largest spiritualist center in the world. It's roots are affiliated with the Fox sisters, Katie and Margaret, who at ages 11 and nine, respectively, on March 31, 1848, told people they held conversations with ghosts that had taken up residence in their home’s walls in Hydesville, NY. Their “haunted house” ended up being moved in 1916 to Lily Dale only to burn to the ground four decades later. The girls have long been credited with launching America’s spiritualist movement, even though some historians have labeled them pranksters.

On the sunny early August afternoon that I stroll these streets, nearly 50 Canadian believers are holding one of many conventions that are held here each year. A white-haired guy at the podium insists that most nonbelievers must first experience a physical apparition, such as seeing a bottle move on its own across a table or hearing some unexplained rapping in their homes, before they buy into spiritualism.

At the nearby corner of Library and East streets, another older gentlemen talks with a young couple inside the one-room Lily Dale Museum about his interpretations of handshake energy he receives when he greets people. Instead, I concentrate on an old photo of Susan B. Anthony and am surprised to learn that the famous suffragette once held court in town. She recognized the Lily Dale Assembly for its equal treatment of women, whom she believed were oppressed by Christianity. Down the wall is a series of portraits with piercing eyes the museum insists appeared by themselves on paper at the hands of spirits.

The museum is a short walk from Leolyn Forest, where services have been held since 1898. The historic stump is down a path from a creepy pet cemetery that even holds the remains of a horse. Circled in ducky stones, it’s the grave of Topsy, a white horse that plowed snow from local streets and died Feb. 13, 1900, when it fell through thin ice on the lake.

The ancient woods turn dark and damp under old-growth pine and maple trees. There gathered before the stump are about 100 people seated in park benches. A bird chirps nonstop from a nearby branch as resident or visiting mediums take turns at the stage to channel the dead among the people they handpick from the audience.

This is where things become foggy. The channeled information seems like stuff that could fit into anyone’s life. One woman claims to be on the line with a white-haired regal looking woman in the spirit world. “Do you know who I mean?” the medium asks.

The audience member smiles and nods her head in agreement.

The medium then tells her the dead lady wants her to slow down, that she is biting off more than she can handle. The audience member is in joy, and leaves with some vague message about a teacup.

Come on. Who doesn’t have a special regal aunt, grandmother or great-grandmother who no longer walks the land? And name an average American who isn’t overworked if he or she has enough money to buy the gasoline for the car to get to Lily Dale along with the admission to this out-of-the-ordinary destination.

While Lily Dale is fun to see, it’s going to take a visit from Aunt Blanche spouting off family secrets during a full moon to convert me to this church.

This road stops making sense

NEW PARIS, Pa. – For some old-fashioned fun, turn off your GPS tracker in Bedford, Pa., and stop in this quaint town to ask for directions to Gravity Hill, where the law of physics takes another road.

It’s imperative to visit the Bedford County Visitors Bureau on business Route 30, where the staff is “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind of obedient, cheerful, thrifty, clean and irreverent,” the guide to this kooky hill indicates.

“I think I’m pretty clean today,” the young woman at the desk says after I ask whether she showered this morning.

“What do you think of the hill?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s a quirky place that we took on,” she replies. “It worked. Tour buses go there, so has Science Magazine.”

She then opens a hot pink and black brochure to its page with directions to this destination, instructs me to stay on Route 30 west and make a right at the only red light in Schellsburg.

“Are there signs?” I ask.

“Oh, no. That’s why it’s important to follow these very detailed directions,” she says.

US Route 30 in Pennsylvania dates to 1913 and is near or sometimes part of Lincoln Highway, the first paved coast-to-coast highway in America. In the Bedford area, however, the road is dwarfed by the nearby Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened in 1940 as the nation’s first rural highway.

I'm en route to New Paris that has a population of 214 people unless someone died since the 2000 census.

The 8-mile trip on Route 30 takes in cow pastures, a goat farm and several beautiful old stone farmhouses. Another four miles along Route 96 north leads to a narrow and winding couple of miles on Bethel Hollow Road and a right turn to the famed Gravity Hill Road, where turning around in a driveway is strictly prohibited.

Save for a lonely tractor pulling a hay wagon, no one else is on this road today. I pull out the official guide, where it instructs me to “look for the GH spray painted on the road. Go past the first GH about 1/10 mile and stop at the second GH.”

It goes on.

“First, you need to stay calm … put your car in neutral (after checking in your mirror for oncoming traffic, of course) and take your foot off the brake.”

Now, everything about this road tells me that I am traveling downhill. After following said directions, my well-oiled Ford pickup begins to drift backwards at a good clip. This is freaking me out. Yep, the truck seems like it’s being pulled uphill by a giant magnet.

I also know in my mind that physicists have already been here with scientific measuring tools that confirm that this hill is among many such optical illusions across the globe. The horizon line and tilt of the trees and slopes all come together to trick the eye into believing the law of gravity has been suspended.

Regardless, this gem offers one of those precious thrills in life that does not come with the steep price of a day pass to a theme park.

Remastering a Wright

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Isabelle Martin walked out the front door of her outlandish Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home toward the end of the Great Depression, never to return.

The widow of Darwin Martin, a longtime Wright patron, had little if any money in 1937 when she left her "weird" house in Buffalo, NY, that was considered an to be eyesore by her neighbors.

“She couldn’t give it away because no one wanted it,” said Margaret P. Stehlik, director of operations for the Martin House Restoration Corp. in Buffalo, N.Y. “It was a very strange building.”

It’s obvious, now, that Martin’s neighbors were clueless about Wright’s genius or how he would later impact America’s concept and appreciation of great architecture.

Today, the house is undergoing the costliest restoration project ever performed on a design by the greatest American architect of the 20th century. The restoration corporation hopes to invest $50 million to transform this house into the best example of Wright’s prairie houses in the nation. It also is seeking to lure tourism dollars to Buffalo, knowing that Wright’s beloved Fallingwater in Faytte County draws more than 140,000 visitors a year.

“When this is done, people are going to say, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Stehlik told a July tour group.

Darwin D. Martin made a fortune as secretary of the Larkin Soap Co., a Buffalo-based powerhouse in the mail-order trade. He also influenced the company to hire Wright in 1904 to design the groundbreaking Larkin Administration Building, a remarkable innovation that had air-conditioning and built-in office furniture. However, the building was razed in 1950.

Recognizing Wright’s gift, Martin also hired the architect in 1904 to build his family a mansion in Buffalo’s tony Parkside district.

The suburb developed alongside a network of lovely parks designed in 1868 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the superintendent of New York’s Central Park who founded America’s landscape movement. Buffalo’s wealthy businessmen were soon attracted to Parkside, where they built pretty Victorian, Queen Anne and Tudor-style houses.


But Wright shunned those construction styles, having considered their sharp rising roof lines as being “fantastic abortions tortured by features,” like large, reaching chimneys that interrupted the sky. Those houses, he believed, lacked individuality.

“A house that has character stands a good chance of growing more valuable as it grows older while a house in the prevailing mode, whatever that mode may be, is soon out of fashion, stale and unprofitable,” Wright wrote in the 1941 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture.”

Martin, who rose to become one of America’s wealthiest executives of his time, apparently gave Wright an unlimited budget to build the 15,000-square-foot, two-story yellow Roman brick house. It cost him $175,000, excluding the windows and furnishing, an incredible sum of money at the time.

True to Wright’s signature designs, it has long dramatic horizontal lines, a solid base to firmly root it to the ground and a low rising roof with wide cantilevered eaves.

He went as far as to omit gutter downspouts so not to interfere with the horizontal planes, leaving rain water to free-flow to the ground.

Isabelle Martin didn’t always buy into Wright’s ideas, and complained that her house was too dark as she grew older and her eyesight began to fail.

The light danced through 394 art glass windows with sheets of gold sandwiched between two layers of iridescent glass. While Wright did not name the design, it is commonly called the “Tree of Life” and believed to be inspired by the wisteria tree.

A 15,000-piece glass mosaic in a wisteria design surrounded the main walk-around fireplace. Exposed to the elements, it fell to pieces and is expected to be recreated with new, matching glass.

The pergola, which has been rebuilt to its original scope, stretches from the back door and creates a 180-foot-long, straight unobstructed view from the front door to a statue in the new conservatory.

“It’s certainly an unusual way to come into a home, particularly at the turn of the century,” Stehlik said.

The original conservatory, with built-in planters, also was razed after the house was abandoned and left open to vandals for nearly two decades after Isabelle Martin left. Children then played inside and were even known to roller-skate down the long hall.

Eventually, the property was sold to an architect and then to the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1967, which used it for a time as its presidents’ residence. The nonprofit corporation now charged with preserving the house took ownership in 2002.

But by then, the university had already replaced the Wright kitchen and its thick milk glass counters with a 1970s-style canary yellow Formica design.

Piece by piece the house is being returned to its origins, although the heavy kitchen glass is no longer produced. In the meantime, it lacks furnishings and offers tourists a peek into the many challenges these projects encounter. Facing a $13 million shortfall in the money needed to finish the restorations, Stehlik said she doesn’t know when the house at 125 Jewett Parkway will entirely satisfy the many Wright fans who visit.

“When you come back, I think you’ll be dazzled,” she said.

Amazing Pittsburgh Firsts

From the Sen. John Heinz Regional History Center, Happy 250th birthday Pittsburgh!

The hippy farm

The hippy farm, originally uploaded by Scott Beveridge.

Here we have apparent peace, love and understanding on a farm in Center Township, Beaver County, Pa.