Pilgrimage to Pittsburgh

Except it really wasn’t, it was more like a fun four days in our old home town. For years my brother and have talked about going to Pittsburgh, visit our parents grave, wander around some of our old haunts, maybe see a few old friends. And that’s pretty much exactly what we did, except we were a foursome, with Mark and Jen along, and we stayed right downtown and although we did get out to some of our “old stomping grounds” as our mom would’ve said, there were lots of other places we didn’t see.

I hadn’t been there for 15 years, my brother more like 20.

Mark and I drove, and Dave & Jen flew.

We stayed at the William Penn, although both my brother and I thought we were staying at what is now the Wyndham, but was the Pittsburgh Hilton. It’s closer to Point State Park, and where I stayed my last Pittsburgh trip 15 years ago. At that time it was no-name because there were legal battles going on, and it was morphing from the Hilton to something unknown. The original Pittsburgh Hilton was built in 1956 and when were kids it was supposed to be just about the fanciest hotel in town. Anyways, until my brother got there the next day and confirmed that he thought he’d booked a different hotel (what’s now the Wyndham), I kept going in and out the Wm. Penn and trying to jive its geography with the formerly Hilton.

The drive there was easy and we got checked in and walked to the Strip District, a formerly industrial area where produce trucks came into the city and there were lots of vegetable and fish and meat wholesalers, and restaurant supply places. It’s now very touristy although there are still a few markets, like Robert Wholey’s and Pennsylvania Macaroni Company. I was afraid that the walk from downtown to the Strip would be through some pretty desolate places, but realized that all we had to do was walk towards the convention center and we’d be staying in gentrified tourist zones, which turned out to be true. We ended up at Ironborn Pizza, and only had to wait about 15 minutes to be seated for a spicy pie and watched the last of the Pirates beating the Mets, including a post game homage to Dave Parker, who died that day.

 

We had a vacation style morning the next day. My brother wasn’t arriving until about 5:00 and we had a lunch date at 1:00, so no need to get up too early. We had coffee at the Strip district location of a place called De Fer. The coffee was good, and there was the added bonus of a banana for Mark. Then we set off to walk. We started across the David McCullough Bridge.

Then proceeded to walk the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and the other three bridges (Rachel Carson, Andy Warhol, and Roberto Clemente) that have been renamed and made walking friendly and tourist-y. Mark got a bit irritated with me because I kept looking around too much, trying to figure out where stuff was now vs. what I remembered, so I wasn’t walking fast enough.

We met our lunch date, and the restaurant was so-so, but the conversation was much better than that.

By then we’d walked almost 7 miles and it was hot and humid so we went back to the hotel to wait for my brother and Jen to arrive. From where we were sitting in the lobby, I thought I’d be able to see them check in, but somehow I missed them, and we met in the bar. It was getting to be dinner time, and my brother had googled the China Town Inn, and it was still there. Our dad used to take us there, on Sunday mornings we’d do something like go swimming at University of Pittsburgh’s pool or go to a museum or the zoo, and then we’d go eat. We got egg rolls and green beans and mu shoo veggies and it was just right.

We walked back to the hotel and turned in.

Monday we got up and got coffee at La Prima, another coffee place we’d tried – we got iced drinks at their Strip District location on the way back to the hotel Sunday. Monday we tried what they call their downtown location, even though it’s on Smallman St. All the coffee joints we tried in Pittsburgh were good.

We got the car out of the parking lot, the round n roundin one that’s been there since we were kids, and drove out to Point Breeze Homewood Cemetery to visit our parents’ grave. My friend Marion met us there. She’s kind of been watching over our folks. There’s a number of her family there to visit as well. On the walk back we went past the bridge that fell down when Biden was prez, and tried to cut through one of the mausoleums for a short cut. It didn’t work, and I was glad there was five of us to counteract the feeling of being trapped in the mausoleum. But we got back to our cars and Marion went back to her volunteer job and we drove first to Hampton St., where we lived from 1967 until we each left Pittsburgh, me in 1974 and 1977, my brother in 1975, and our mom in 2000, and then out to O’Hara Township where we lived from 1956-1967. I would’ve liked to walk around the Highland Park Reservoir, but we’d done a good bit of walking already in the cemetery, and opted to drive instead. 

We drove back to the Strip District on the north side of the Allegheny River, and crossed over at Lawrenceville/Bloomfield and wound up at Primanti’s in the Strip for lunch. We had to wait a little longer than we had at the pizza place, but it was worth it. 

 

Monday night’s entertainment was baseball, an easy walk over the Roberto Clemente Bridge. The Pirates were on a streak – they beat the Mets 3 in a row, and then St. Louis 3 in a row, one of which was the game we saw. They’ve followed my brother back to Seattle and are currently down by two but it’s only the 4th inning. They have racing Pirogies at PNC park instead of the sausages like the Brewers have. The blue one won, but I have no idea what flavor it was.

Tuesday was the rainy day. Mark and I were meeting Marion and several other people for lunch in Point Breeze, my high school boyfriend’s younger brother Paul, and another guy, Ron, or Ronnie as he was known back then. We went to get coffee back at De Fer and were debating whether to take the bus or go back to the hotel and get the car, and it started raining so hard that we decided to call an Uber or Lyft direct from the coffee place. Lunch was reminiscing but also hearing about people’s kids and who’s doing what now. 

Paul brought me a glass rolling pin, a gift from my old boyfriend, his older brother Chris. You’re supposed to be able to put ice cubes inside it to keep it cold while you roll out your pastry. I tried it out to make a blueberry pie on 4th of July – more on that later. I suspect it is from a yard sale in West Virginia, where Chris lives. It was in a box wrapped in old newspapers and blue tape, and looked pretty disreputable. Ron gave us a ride to the art museum where we met Dave and Jen. We all got in free because of being a) old, and b) members of other museums in other cities with reciprocity. As soon as we got our admittance tags, that somewhat disappointingly, are green paper tags on a string, like price tags, instead of the little metal buttons they used to give, I had to stash the box in one of the museum’s self check lockers which is what they have instead of a cloak room now. The lockers needed quarters but the change machine was busted, so we just put our stuff, umbrellas raincoats and the disreputable box, in a locker and closed it and it was all still there when we came back.  

I took so many pictures at the museum, I’m going to post them separately. I spent a lot of time at the Carnegie both as a kid and when I was an art history major at Pitt and I kept getting drawn to things that were there when I was younger.

We took the bus back downtown, and I had a Willy St Co-op online meeting at 5:30. I had time to walk to the Target that’s in the old Kaufman’s building, under the clock, and get a bag of gummy bears (that I was awfully glad we had when we were stuck in traffic in Chicago, driving home the next day), and a canned La Colombe latte, and a couple of bananas for Mark.

Dave and Jen had gone to a place on Liberty Ave. for a drink, and we picked them up there and then went to get dinner at DiAnoia’s Eatery. Again we had to wait but managed. The restaurant’s got some mixed reviews but we enjoyed it. We had fried zucchini (that was more like mozzarella sticks than my vision of fried zucchini, which is long planks of zucchini with a tempura batter, and you squeeze lemon wedges on them as you eat, but it was still good), and a peach and corn salad to start. Then a roasted cauliflower and a puffed up, upside-down, pizza dough bread. And two pastas, caccio e pepe, and another that was like a ruffled fettuccine. And a tiramisu with 4 spoons and vin santo and coffee for Mark. I had terrible trouble sleeping after all that, plus worrying about the drive back.

We took some pictures of the Heinz ketchup sign on the History Museum on the way back to the hotel after dinner.

And we all the liked the rounded windows on the old Alcoa building that seems to be turning into condos now.

Said drive actually all went fine, except for getting quite jammed up in traffic in Chicago. There’s construction on I-90/94 around Armitage, and things backed up starting around the Jackson St. exit, the very start of the actual Loop, south of Jackson is the South Loop. IMHO, anyways. The construction took 90/94 down to 2 lanes from 4, and you couldn’t even get into the express lanes, they were so backed up. Especially because this was the Wednesday before a Friday 4th of July, around 2:30 in the afternoon. We eventually got off and got onto Milwaukee St. but couldn’t figure out a better place to get back on the highway than Fullerton, and things were still pretty jammed all the way to Irving Park Rd and where 94 splits off. Hence the need for gummy bears.

But we made it back by 6:00ish, so only lost about an hour.

And yea, I really liked being in Pittsburgh. I can’t really see myself actually living there again, but I sure liked visiting. Maybe next year …..