Category Archive: Education
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Renowned architect designed Scaife Gallery
By Jerry Vondas
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, September 24, 2004Edward L. Barnes, who designed the Sarah M. Scaife Gallery at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, once said that most architectural ideas can be expressed on the back of an envelope.
“He was not terribly concerned about getting credit, just concerned about doing the job right, and he did do it right,” Carnegie Museum of Art board member James L. Winokur said in a magazine published by the Carnegie Museums.Edward Larrabee Barnes, of Cambridge, Mass., died from complications of a stroke on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004, in Cupertino, Calif. He was 89.
Arthur Ziegler, president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, called the Scaife Gallery, which opened in 1974, “a fine example of a contemporary, later 20th century design in Oakland.”
Richard M. Scaife, the son of Sarah M. Scaife and owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, praised Mr. Barnes’ talents.
“I was delighted that it turned out as well as it did,” he said of the gallery.
Mrs. Scaife died in 1965, and her family and the Scaife Foundation presented the gallery to Carnegie Institute in her memory.
“I had a lot of adventures with Ed Barnes, and I came to have great respect for him,” said Winokur, who visited the construction site several times a week in the early 1970s. “The Scaife building fell right into place. It couldn’t have been done at a better time, and it couldn’t have been done better.”
Richard Armstrong, Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, told the Carnegie magazine, “Of the many museums built in the 1970s, this is among the half-dozen best.”
“It receives people well, it functions very cleanly, and its greatest attribute is the incomparable light in the galleries. It’s not dated. It is truly very sophisticated architecture. It simplifies and elevates the Beaux-Arts ideals in the Alden and Harlow building next door.
“It expunges decoration and exalts the idea of the building as a container and a noble stage.
“Its strength, in fact, is evident in the graciousness with which it accommodates changing attitudes toward exhibiting works of art, a graciousness characteristic of the architect who created it.”
In the 50 years since the end of World War II and his discharge from the Navy, Mr. Barnes designed the IBM corporate building in Manhattan, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, D.C., among others.
His master plans also included work done at Williamsburg, Va., the New York and Chicago botanical gardens and the National University of Singapore.
Born in an Episcopal family in Chicago, Mr. Barnes was the son of Cecil Barnes, an attorney, and Margaret Helen Ayer Barnes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Years of Grace.”
He entered Harvard University in 1934 and studied English before focusing on art history and then the history of architecture.
After graduating, Mr. Barnes taught English at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, his alma mater. But his interest in the works of Walter Gropius, his mentor at Harvard, and Marcel Breuer convinced him that architecture was his true calling.
Mr. Barnes is survived by his wife, the former Mary Elizabeth Coss, an architect whom he married in 1944; a son, John Barnes, of Davenport, Calif.; and two granddaughters.
Jerry Vondas can be reached at jvondas@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7823.
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Winchester Thurston needs expansion space at its Hampton campus – This barn free for the taking
By Jill Cueni-Cohen
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Wednesday, September 08, 2004Since opening its doors in 1987, the Winchester Thurston School in Hampton has retained the feel of a charming little farm.
“This area used to be an old horse farm, and the upper field used to be the outdoor arena,” said Nancy Rogers, director of the campus on Middle Road, which houses kindergarten through fifth grade. “The farmhouse holds our fifth-grade class, and they’re known as the Farm House Gang. [The property] also has a springhouse. … We had it renovated, and it’s used as an auxiliary science center, now called the Pond House because it’s down by the pond.”
A white, 4,000-square-foot Dutch-style barn with a gambrel roof completes the pastoral scene.
But it won’t be there for long.
Eighty pupils attend the Hampton location of the independent day school, which has its main campus in Shadyside. But more are expected, so the school plans to expand — and the barn has to go.
Rather than tear it down, though, school officials are offering to give it away — as long as the taker complies with several requirements, the most important being that the barn is dismantled and removed from the site in its entirety.
Although the barn is used only for storage, the pupils enjoy having it on their campus and have been preparing for the loss by drawing pictures and writing poems about it, Rogers said.
“Everyone’s attached to the barn because it’s part of our landscape and is visually nice to look at,” she said. “One day there was a science class going on, and our janitor was in the hay loft, helping them do an egg-drop experiment. It was such a cute thing to see.”
Inquiries about the barn, which was built around 1940, have come from as far away as Oklahoma in response to an e-mail that was circulated by the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, said Eric Harrison, program and construction manager for both Winchester Thurston campuses.
Gwyneth Windon, culture and heritage programs manager at Oklahoma’s tourism department, said the group was hoping to save the barn from destruction.
“We love barns, but we don’t have the money to move it,” she said. “I wish I was a philanthropist and could just say, ‘Move it here,’ but it’s not old enough to be of interest to certain people. I called because I just wanted to see if there was a chance we could help.”
The majority of the inquiries have been from local people. “Most are people who need a barn for their working farm,” Harrison said, “and some are parties affiliated with the Amish, who are experts in this field.
“One individual has a cut-flower business and wants it to become a part of their operation; another lost his barn in a fire and needed it to be replaced,” he added. “There’s a whole spectrum of people in the business of agriculture and commerce that need it to fulfill some of their business requirements. The response we’re getting indicates that people are seeing a great deal of value in the barn.”
Harrison said Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy, who has a farm in the northern suburbs, called him about the possibility of removing the barn. Indiana Township engineer Jim Mitnick considered but then dismissed the notion of taking the barn. “I looked at the barn, but because it’s 100 percent nailed, it would be [too difficult] to take down and rebuild. It’s also made of nothing but 2x4s and 2x6s, and there’s absolutely no value there.”
Mitnick added that he has had some experience in barn relocation, but it’s preferable to work with a barn that’s been assembled with a combination of pegs and nails. “With a peg barn, you can pull the nailed members off easily and disassemble the barn. It took my barn four days to take apart. It would take four months to get all the nails out of the barn [at Winchester Thurston], and you would end up ruining 50 percent of the wood.”
Mitnick said he thought the school should bulldoze the structure and be done with it. “There’s nothing historical about it and not one decent piece of wood in the entire barn.”
Despite Mitnick’s assessment, Harrison is still optimistic that the barn will find a good home.
“It has a second floor and a first floor, which opens onto grade,” he described, “and its condition is rated from good to excellent. There’s been no penetration of the elements to cause deterioration in the structure, and no break or deterioration in the frame work or the roofing. I think it’s very attractive, and with some work, it can be made even more so.”
The school plans to construct a building that will contain a large multipurpose room, a music room and a glass-enclosed art room that will overlook the pond.
“This is part of the construction we have planned for both campuses,” Rogers said, adding that the school expects it to be finished for the 2004-05 school year.
The new building will retain rural, country elements, she said.
Jack Miller, director of gift planning for the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, commended the school for trying to save the barn.
Miller said that the foundation, which runs a rural preservation network, looked at adapting the barn to become a visitor center for its historic Neville House in Collier, but its style was not of the right period.
“We saw that we couldn’t make an adaptive use for the barn, but we didn’t want to see it destroyed,” said Miller. He and the foundation’s preservation expert went through the barn and did not see any problems with the wood, which could be used in a number of ways.
“Wood is expensive,” he said. “And if the structure can be adapted, who’s to say you shouldn’t do that? Who cares what anyone says?”
“Harrison has received all these calls, and my guess is that someone will take him up on this offer. For decades, people have told us that historic preservation doesn’t make sense, and for years we’ve been proving that it does,” added Miller, noting that Station Square, the location of the foundation’s home, is a perfect example of preservation gone right. “If a person can find a creative way to use something, it makes sense to encourage them.”
Miller said it’s heartening to hear how many people are interested in saving the barn. “Just the fact that there’s a barn left [in Pittsburgh] is amazing. What this tells me is that people have a sense of the significance of preservation. Adaptive use is really the key to our future.”
(Jill Cueni-Cohen is a freelance writer.)
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Landmarks Awards Two Scholarships to College-Bound Students
Pittsburgh, Pa….For the sixth consecutive year, the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation (Landmarks) has sponsored a scholarship program for students in Allegheny County who are interested in the history, architecture, and landscape design of the Pittsburgh region. Two students––out of 49 applicants––were awarded $4,000 scholarships during a luncheon celebration on June 17.
This year’s scholarship winners are:
• Sara E. Stranahan of Steel Valley Senior High School, who will be attending the University of Pittsburgh, where she intends to major in biology/pre-med
• James P. Washabaugh from Perry Traditional Academy, who will be attending Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture
Since the inception of the scholarship program in 1999, Landmarks has funded a total of 17 scholarships. Currently, scholarship recipients are attending Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham College, Columbia University, Howard University, Syracuse University, and the University of Pittsburgh.
According to Landmarks’ Chairman Philip B. Hallen, “The Landmarks Scholarship program is giving us the opportunity to develop relationships with young people who care about their hometown and understand the value of historic preservation, and who are developing their skills by pursuing a college education. We are grateful to several of our trustees whose contributions fund this scholarship program.”
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School closings can be historic treasure trove
By Ruth Ann Dailey
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Monday, March 29, 2004Buy low, sell high. That’s the rule of thumb if you want to make a profit. But when the commodity you’re selling belongs to the taxpayers — who may not want you to sell in the first place — you’re undertaking a dicey enterprise.
That’s the situation the Pittsburgh school district finds itself in. District leaders have proposed — again — to close some of the half-empty schools draining the public till.
The financial logic of their choice is irrefutable. The district pays to operate space that isn’t used — and won’t be, unless patterns of the last four decades suddenly reverse themselves and suburbanites pour into the city. With nearly a third more classroom space than is needed, which buildings should the district close?
Parents are pleading to preserve schools in their own neighborhoods, and officials have promised to move judiciously. But there are other factors besides public outcry to consider in deciding which buildings to ax — real estate values, history and architectural significance, to name a few.
But officials know that; they’ve done this thing before.
Among the huge list of school district real estate sales — available at the Recorder of Deeds office — is the listing for the North Side’s old Latimer School. The district sold this building to a development group in 1983 for $231,000. Now known as The School House, the imposing 40-unit apartment building has been resold twice since then — most recently in 1999 for a little less than its assessed value of $3.5 million.
From $231,000 to $3.5 million is a heck of a climb — even when you factor in renovation costs. In 1986, just a few years after it was sold, the Latimer School was added to the National Register of Historic Places — part of a formidable undertaking by local preservationists. By late 1987, according to the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, 48 other district schools had been placed on the register — including Schiller Classical Academy (just north of the former Heinz plant) and Beltzhoover Elementary School (southeast of the Liberty Tubes).
Though Schiller was slated for closing in the district’s circa 2000 effort, protests bought it a reprieve. Last fall it was the only North Side middle school to out-perform the state’s “needs improvement” list. Now it turns away eager transfer students. Because of (despite?) its attractive Art Deco auditorium and prime location near both the Penn Brewery and North Catholic High School, Schiller’s not on this year’s closing list.
Beautiful Beltzhoover is. With its commanding presence high above the city, a private-sector transformation is easy to imagine. But the same attributes that appeal to loft dwellers make the building ideal for young children. Its rooms — much more spacious than those in the nearby schools to which many of Beltzhoover’s students have been reassigned — are large enough to hold things like special story corners.
Its halls held the last school carnival when rainy skies pushed it indoors, says Patricia Grandy, librarian since 1973. “We’d hate to see it close.”
Whether the school district targets Beltzhoover for education or for real estate development, there’s gold in them thar halls — and taxpayers who own it.
(Ruth Ann Dailey is a Post-Gazette staff writer and can be reached at rdailey@post-gazette.com.)
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Ligonier Valley engineers winning riverfront design
By Marjorie Wertz
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 21, 2004The hardest part was getting started. But once they did, the Ligonier Valley High School Budding Builders team constructed a first-place showing in the 2003-04 Westmoreland County Architectural Design Challenge.
Westmoreland County Gifted Coalition and the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation sponsored the eighth annual competition. The challenge called for student teams to select an appropriate site for a barge building and construct a model detailing the plans. School teams were given a choice of 10 different sites along the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers in Pittsburgh.
“The students chose to base their model on a site along the Mon River, across from the Technology Center,” at the South Side Works Development, formerly J & L Steel, said Jennifer Brisendine, one of Ligonier Valley High’s four gifted program advisers.
Senior David Poerschke, who served as team leader, has participated in the challenge for three years. He was joined on this year’s team by junior Kelly Morrisey; junior Patrick Sharbaugh; senior Stephanie Pompelia; and junior Abby Orchard.
“In my sophomore year, we were given the challenge to remodel one of the old Carnegie libraries. Last year, we were assigned an empty lot on the North Side and told we could build whatever we wanted,” Poerschke said. “This year’s challenge was more open. We had to come up with a place to start.”
Morrisey, a 16-year-old who has been interested in architecture for several years, said the team labored to develop a concept.
“Once you have a good concept, you build from there,” said Morrisey. “The team discussed the concept of our design for a while.”
“It was a very open-ended assignment and, since I’m a very structured person, it was difficult to get started,” said Pompelia, whose father, Mick, took her on a tour of the South Side bike trail.
“It gave me the idea of incorporating a rest area and information center in the model,” Pompelia added. The model had to be based on the size of an actual barge, 150 feet long by 35 feet wide. The students could build whatever design they wanted, as long as the model remained within the specifications.
“The team came up with a cross between a barge building, an information center, and a rest area for people who use the bike trail along the river,” said Brisendine. “The students really had to think outside the box on this assignment.”
In addition to model construction, the team had to write a report detailing the project and present an oral report to competing teams and judges. Projects were judged on feasibility, creativity, aesthetics, effectiveness of the oral presentation, and teamwork.
The budding builders worked on their project from October to Feb. 10, the day of the judging. Other high school participants were three teams from Belle Vernon Area; three teams from Mt. Pleasant Area; Yough; Burrell; Connellsville Area; four teams from Franklin Regional in Murrysville; Greater Latrobe; and two teams from Ligonier Valley.
Twenty-two middle school teams also competed. They were Laurel Valley; two teams from Burrell; Mt. Pleasant; five Franklin Regional teams; three teams from Greensburg Salem; three teams from Rostraver in Belle Vernon Area; four Penn-Trafford teams; Yough; Valley; and Greater Latrobe.
“We were incredibly impressed with the quality and the time the students put into the projects,” said Louise Sturgess, executive director of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. “They come up with the most ingenious use of materials in their models. All the models are beautifully made. It’s incredible what these students can do.”
In the past several years, some of the students’ work has been utilized in renovation projects in the Pittsburgh area.
“In the new renovation plans for the Brookline and Homewood Carnegie Libraries, many of the elements that the students had in their models from several years ago are being incorporated into these renovations,” said Sturgess.
The 2004-05 competition will focus on the Fifth and Forbes area of Pittsburgh, Sturgess said.
“We’ll probably take them downtown in October and have them focus on a building or two and working toward preserving a building,” she added. “Maybe the students can trigger new life in the Fifth and Forbes area of Pittsburgh.”
Marjorie Wertz can be reached at mwertz@tribweb.com or (724) 522-2904.
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Some old schools are seeking new purpose
By Maggi Newhouse
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, February 23, 2004South Hills High School is a cold, hollow place.
The plaster is peeling, the hardwood floors are buckling and rain water streams in through the porous roof.
The massive building in Mt. Washington, which opened in 1916, once drew so many students from Pittsburgh’s southern communities that graduation programs had to be split over two days. It is one of more than a half-dozen district-owned schools that closed during the past 20 years due to declining enrollment.
School officials now face the daunting challenge of trying to persuade community groups and developers to restore and reuse these deteriorating buildings.
After two decades of futility, the district last month transferred the rights to South Hills High to the Urban Redevelopment Authority, hoping that city agency will have better luck.
There have been success stories.The old Latimer junior/senior high school on the North Side, which closed in 1982, was sold to a developer who converted the classrooms into the School House apartments and preserved many of the original features of the 106-year-old building, including the stairways and classroom numbers, said building manager Sarah Beck.
The Carriage House Children’s Center purchased Wightman Elementary School in 1986, six years after it closed. It now uses the basement and first floor of the Squirrel Hill facility for its preschool and full-day programs and leases the second floor to nonprofits.
Carriage House Executive Director Natalie Kaplan said the center has spent about $1.5 million to renovate and bring the building up to code, but also saved many distinctive features, including a third-floor gymnasium and several stained glass windows.
“It’s very exciting,” Kaplan said. “People come from out of town all the time and say ‘I went to school here. Can I walk around?'”
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Executive Director Louise Sturgess said that many city schools were built with quality materials, in prominent locations, to demonstrate the value of education to the community.
“The buildings were built to be permanent, to be symbols to the community that education is important,” she said.
That’s exactly what the Rev. Tim Smith sees every day from his office at Keystone Church of Hazelwood.
Next door, on a hillside overlooking Hazelwood, stands Gladstone Middle School.
Smith remembers its hallways being filled with people after the school day had ended. They came for computer and adult literacy classes, YMCA programs and athletic events.
When the district closed the 90-year-old school in 2001, many of the community programs went with it, Smith said.
“It was a place to go for a lot of kids who didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said. “It was pretty devastating, in my opinion.”
Smith heads the Gladstone Task Force, a group created by the Hazelwood Initiative. They have petitioned the school district to help pay for a $60,000 study looking at options for Gladstone.
There’s even hope for South Hills High School.
Jim DeGilio, a member of the Mt. Washington Community Development Corp., said a number of developers are moving forward with plans to buy the building and make it into a combination residential and commercial site.
DeGilio said it would cost about $20 million to repair and convert the 3.4-acre property.
While officials say they try to work with community groups interested in the properties, it often takes years for projects to move forward.
The poor condition of South Hills High, which closed in 1985, prompted school board members last month to ask the staff for recommendations.
“It’s unlikely we’d have something as drastic happen in most of these other buildings, but we would still want to move more expeditiously (on those schools) than we did on South Hills,” said district Chief Operations Officer Richard Fellers.
Fellers said his staff plans to have recommendations on other properties by late spring or early summer.
Fellers said a staff member is assigned to each school to make sure the building and surrounding grounds are maintained. Each school also is on the district’s security system.
“We do continue to look after them,” he said, noting the district still has to pay for utilities and general supplies to maintain the buildings.
School board member Randall Taylor said he would like to see something happen as soon as possible with the former Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts building in Homewood.
The 96-year-old building, a former elementary school, closed last year when the district opened the new CAPA school Downtown.
Taylor said he has been talking with community groups and other people about trying to develop a community center geared toward families, but that could take years.
His fear is that people will vandalize and tamper with the building now that it is empty.
“The schools are protected when the kids are there,” he said. “Now that they’re gone, all bets are off.”
Maggi Newhouse can be reached at mnewhouse@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7997.
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General’s funeral will be re-enacted
By Meredith Polley
For the Tribune-Review
Sunday, August 10, 2003To commemorate the bicentennial of Gen. John Neville’s death, visitors to the Neville House in Collier today can experience a closed-coffin re-enactment of a 19th-century funeral.
The Rev. Richard Davies, of Old St. Luke’s Church, which Neville helped found, will perform a service at 2 p.m. in the parlor of the mansion known as Woodville Plantation.If weather permits, costumed soldiers and a drummer from the Fort Pitt Royal Americans then will carry the coffin outdoors to a spot where a number of modern dignitaries will assist in recreating the general’s funeral.
They include historian Ron Carlisle, author of “The Story of Woodville;” U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair; and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation Executive Director Louise Sturgess.
The Neville House Associates volunteers who run the house planned the event to draw attention to Neville’s career and Woodville’s history.
“We want to show people what funerals of the day were like,” said Neville House President Nancy Bishop. “We know it’s unusual, but mostly because it is the 200th anniversary of Neville’s death, we knew we had to do something.”Neville, who died at 72 on July 29, 1803, served in the Revolutionary War, was a commandant at Fort Pitt and a friend of George Washington. The local tax collector, Neville lost his later residence, called Bower Hill, when angry farmers protested the excise tax on whiskey in 1794.
Visitors who attend the service may be asked to read eulogies to make the funeral authentic and interactive.
The event will include the dedication of a memorial shelter on the grounds built to house three original Neville tombstones — including those of Neville and his wife. The house will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. All events are free.
Mari Jean Ferguson, a Neville House docent and professor at La Roche College, showed off a collection of artifacts Thursday.
Ferguson said she hopes the services will be inspirational.
“It helps to have our heroes,” she said. “To know that others overcame many challenges in the past can inspire us today, and the connections people make with history can show that we are one big family
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Downtown is a place we can all look up to
Sunday, June 01, 2003
Pittsburgh Post GazetteThe kids listened hard. When the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation tour of Downtown was over, they were of one mind. Summed up by me from the versions I heard, the majority opinion was, “I didn’t know what an important city Pittsburgh is.”
What grabbed our interest early was hearing that Abraham Lincoln had given a speech from the balcony of the Monongahela House, a hotel at Smithfield Street and Fort Pitt Boulevard. Now on the corner is a building housing United Way. For all of us, Lincoln is an important icon, one of the first individuals to dominate the imagination when we learned about him in school.
I was as impressed to hear of Lincoln’s visit as were the Winchester Thurston third-graders, on tour with their teacher, Ani Esther Rubin (of whom I am the mother). And what a good teacher she is. Eliza Nevin, a docent from the History and Landmarks Foundation, in an effort to keep us engaged, threw out questions to these boys and girls. They knew the answers.
“What river is this?”
“Monongahela.”
“What does that Indian word mean?”
“Crumbling muddy banks.”
“Do you know what Mount Washington was first called?”
We didn’t.
“Coal Mountain, for the mining done there.
“What invention of Elisha G. Otis made tall buildings practical for Downtown?”
“Elevators.”
“With automatic safety devices,” Nevin added.
“Why do we plant trees in the city?”
“To clean the air.”
The children did not know what a morgue was. Except for our guide, none of us knew what a wyvern was. It’s a “grotesque,” in this case a panther’s head with a worm’s body, on a carved plaque outside the morgue or, as the city would have it, the coroner’s office, at Ross Street and Fourth Avenue.
What puzzled me about this Frederick Osterling building, its design inspired by the H.H. Richardson courthouse and jail, was how it got detached from Fifth and Grant, moved downhill, and slid into a corner at Ross and Fourth.
“Why, it got there on rails,” said Nevin.
The 8,000-ton granite building was raised 20 feet off its foundation and placed on 22 tracks of rails, then pulled to the new site by teams of horses. There are documentary photographs in the lobby. It took three months to move, and every day the folks who worked at the morgue entered the building to do business as usual.
This impressed me more than it did the children, who are Abra, Yuvie, Charlie, Jake, Lauren, Allyson, Lisa, Grace and Michael. With us, too, was Michelle Ultmann, a Pittsburgh pediatrician and the mother of Lisa, who had volunteered her time as a chaperone.
The grotesques, fantastic animal and human forms used as architectural decorations, and the gargoyles whose mouths served as spouts for water to drain off a roof, were what the children liked. Yuvie Ben-David offered that their purpose was to ward off evil spirits, and there was general agreement that, indeed, they might have had that effect.
Watching for grotesques, gargoyles and wyverns, we learned a powerful lesson. Look up. It is amazing the details you see on buildings you pass. Along Fourth Avenue, passing the Law and Finance building at 429 where I’ve walked thousands of times, Nevin pointed out the carvings of mustachioed men on the keystones above the fifth-floor windows. This lineup was chosen as decoration because in 1927 when the building opened, mustachioed men dominated law and finance.
Across Fourth and near Smithfield, we stopped to admire Dollar Bank. Brownstone was the building material chosen because it was expensive. (The Duquesne Club is brownstone for the same reason.) With sculpted lions wearing banker’s expressions and guarding the entry way, the bank sent the message that your money is safe here. Built 133 years ago, the bank, along with Trinity Cathedral, was the oldest building visited on our Downtown tour.
And so we wandered across Mellon Square, stopping to appreciate the contribution this park makes to the city. What was it? When I suggested that it covered an urban parking lot, it amused me that the children went straight to their teacher for confirmation. My daughter had their trust, and they would believe what I said when she agreed it was true. That this should be so made me proud.
Crossing Smithfield Street, our guide explained that running as it did through Devereaux Smith’s farm field, it was named Smithfield. Officially Pittsburgh is 245 years old, but the mapping of the Downtown streets was done 219 years ago.
Our last landmark would be the city’s oldest cemetery, beside Trinity Cathedral. Here we stopped at the grave of Mio-qua-coo-na-caw (Red Pole), whose monument reads “Principle Village Chief of the Shawnee Nation died at Pittsburgh the 28th of January 1797. Lamented by the United States.”
And by us as we offered our silent tribute.
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Our tour was taken on a cold blustery day, and stopping for refreshments was on all our minds. The grownups wanted Starbucks, and the kids wanted Candy-Rama. Next time, I’m bringing treats.
Ma Rubin’s Peanut Butter Cookies
1 1/4 cups sifted flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup natural peanut butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup peanuts
Sift together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside. In the large bowl of a mixer, beat butter with peanut butter. Add sugars gradually, and beat until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Add flour mixture, beat to combine. Add peanuts, mix. Drop dough into a plastic bag and chill one hour or overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Shape dough into balls 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten with tines of fork dipped in flour. Bake 15 to 25 minutes (depend on how cold the dough) or until lightly brown. Cool on wire rack. Makes about 3 dozen.
Marilyn McDevitt Rubin can be reached at mrubin@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1749.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette