We haven't been traveling much this year, just a few quick trips to Boston with no specific restaurants or hotels to report on, nor much in the way of touristic activity. Instead, it's been a busy year with activity in local politics instead.
This past long weekend, though, from April 30 through May 4, we traveled to one of our favorite cities, Pittsburgh, for a wedding. We stayed with friends, so we have no report on hotels or bed and breakfasts, but we did eat in several interesting places and enjoyed walking about the city, and the wedding was lots of fun.
We spent some time in the Doughboy section of Lawrenceville, one of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods. When we lived in Pittsburgh there was always talk of doing "something" around the Doughboy statue at the intersection of Penn Avenue and Butler Street in Lawrenceville--an old industrial section with a mostly Polish population. The Doughboy commemorates the soldiers of World War I. Now, 30 years after the thought of doing something around the nearly 100 year old monument, "something" has happened.
The neighborhood that John remembered from working in Pittsburgh as a place of dying steel fabrication and specialty metal shops, with its poor streets and even less interesting street life, has become a center of specialty restaurants and stores, with occasional boutiques thrown in. Many new buildings are going up to blend with the mostly 19th century architecture of small row-houses and an occasional larger home, that he assumed were built for the mill managers before they could move out to East Liberty and other more salubrious parts of the city after 1900. The world-renowned Childrens Hospital is a focal point of this renaissance. It took took over the old St. Francis Hospital, rebuilt it and added to it.
 |
| Jay's Design for soaps |
Of particular interest is a small soap maker's boutique on Butler at 46th Street. Its window contains a fascinating bathtub, more decorated for Christmas than for a soak. Inside are soaps in many different scents, shapes and sizes, and for the animal lover, a dog and several cats to either wag tails or beg for treats. Jay's Design, the name of the store, has been there for several years now. A friendly place, and a great place to buy grainy or not-so-grainy soaps, in scents ranging from grandmotherly lavender to honey and oats.
Closer to the city, a new group of buildings house a restaurant that's been open a few months, run by the former manage at Lidia's, near the Convention Center. While the restaurant, regrettably, caters to stark wall modernity, hence lots of fashionable noise, that meant it was about an hour into our 8 PM sit-down before conversation was easy, the food was superb. Strictly Italian. Ben enjoyed skin-on broiled branzino, starting with a barley-mushroom soup. John enjoyed his meal of breast of duck, with a starter of white anchovies. We ordered a superb wine: a Campanian Italian aglianico, a find that is hard to find in wine stores. It's a descendant varietal of Greek vines brought to southern Italy when the Greeks colonized it about 3000 years ago. In Roman times, Pliny wrote about the wine as "Falernian" wine--the Roman equivalent of a grand cru. It opened beautifully. We will try to find it, though it is unavailable at our local Washington, DC store.
We spent one morning exploring haunts around the city, downtown. We rode the bus to the city center to avoid parking, and found PAT transit on the East Busway not only convenient, but cheap--seniors ride public transport in Pennsylvania for free! Better than the half-price fares of Washington, DC.
 |
| Union Trust stained glass |
 |
| Union Trust Atrium |
After our visit to the Union Trust, we lunched at Eddie Merlot's near the Hilton at Gateway Center. It's an upscale chain and provided excellent soups, hamburgers and salads for us and a friend from when we lived in Pittsburgh.
The only museum that got us was the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, where John spent a happy afternoon with a friend. The museum has grown by leaps and bounds, and provides a true view of what public transport was like when trams ran down the streets of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
And we did seek out coffees--Ben has fallen for Zeke's coffee in the now revitalized East Liberty, and we enjoyed walking around Bakery Square, where Nabisco used to make cookies and now Google may well be involved in electronic cookies at its offices there.
Our last meal, last Monday night, was a birthday celebration, at the Kimpton Hotel's new restaurant, the Commoner, in the Monaco hotel that has been built into the old Duquesne Light headquarters on Mellon Square. Once again it was modernly noisy. The waitress was overly perky and gave adequate but spotty service., We felt the food was lacking in something--something indiscernible. Our oysters were tiny Rappahanocks, that were not full of flavor, but the romaine salad was superb and John enjoyed his "onion soup burger," a specialty of the chef who moved to Pittsburgh from Washington. Ben had seafood stew that was quite ordinary.
The wedding, on the other hand, was not ordinary. Two friends, Tom and John, have been together for 30 years. We met them both separately before leaving Pittsburgh for Washington in 1985. The wedding, now possible because same-sex marriage is now legal in Pennsylvania, was thought out over several months.
.jpg)
First, the venue, the Edgewood Country Club, was an excellent choice, Getting married in a pavilion overlooking a lovely golf course with the Alleghenies in the background is grand, to say the least. Then the guests, most of them long time friends or family members, coming from as far away as Chicago, Washington, New York or Tucson, to celebrate with their old friends. And the cake, surmounted by two polar bears. Nearby stood the cookie table. The cookie table is an old-line Pittsburgh institution where the guests come with containers and containers and containers of home-made cookies. if we were weren't high from the joy of the wedding when the party finished we were high from all the sugar. Cookies in the shape of tuxes, cookie truffles, enough chocolate to keep anyone up all night. It was there. We still have some in our pantry, sealed up in metal cookie tins. The Lutheran minister with a commanding type A presence, gave a rousing homily as part of an enthralling ceremony. The kiss was warm and loving, and everyone enjoyed a day of glee.