90.5 WESA Celebrates: Inventing Pittsburgh

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Who Are We? Looking At Pittsburgh Through Public Art Jan 08, 2016

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The murals in the United States Post Office and Courthouse on Grant Street are pretty hard to get to. There’s security, now, unlike when the Department of Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned the three works in 1934. Two of the octogenerian paintings survive on the 8 th floor; one disappeared. That’s the thing about murals, said Sylvia Rhor, associate professor of art history at Carlow University. They’re large, but they’re not immune to time’s vagaries. They can go missing, be discarded or painted over. “Some of the styles are outdated. Some of the topics don’t seem to fit with the community, so sometimes they’re painted over for that reason. Some of them are offensive. Some of the buildings were destroyed so some murals were lost. Many murals were lost,” she said. The murals Rhor referred to were part of a vast national output in the 1930s and commissioned by a number of agencies created by the federal government, the most famous of which was the Works Progress

How Nate Smith Forced Pittsburgh To Confront Discrimination Jan 01, 2016

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At the Carpenter’s Training Center just outside the City of Pittsburgh on the Parkway West, a class of nine learns how to build a level floor. Forty years ago, getting into the center’s apprenticeship program would have been a feat for a person of color or a woman. “Those days were, you know, the status quo,” said Harold McDonald, a representative for the Keystone+Mountain+Lakes Regional Council of Carpenters. In the 1960s, just two percent of the skilled trades and craft unions’ members were black. Without a connection to the trades, a family member, say, it was difficult to break in, said McDonald. “Nate Smith was an advocate for change for more minorities to be into the construction trades. And the acceptability of those minorities in the trades,” he said. Nate Smith was born in the Hill District in 1929. He joined the Navy at 14, saying he was older, and learned to box. As a professional boxer after the war, Smith taught himself how to operate heavy machinery. In 1951, he traded

Latinos Have A Rich History In The Pittsburgh Region Dec 28, 2015

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From one of the file folders arrayed on her kitchen table, retired Spanish professor María de los Ángeles Stiteler pulls out a lyrics sheet.

Kaufmann’s Aimed To Provide A Home Away From Home For Immigrants Dec 18, 2015

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“There’s Florence and London and Paris and Prague and Brussels.” Lina Insana, chair of the department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, points to a spread from the Kaufmann's department store’s in-house magazine, Storagram, which proclaims the 30th anniversary of the “Foreign Office.” “They used these foreign offices as proof of the quality of their merchandise—how up to date that merchandise was, how up to the minute the styles were,” Insana said. At the time, many department stores had buyers overseas. But Kaufmann’s had something else, the inverse of its Foreign Office with its buyers in Buenos Aires and Shanghai and Bombay: the stateside Foreign Department, smack dab in the middle of Pittsburgh. “In this Foreign Department, all of the sales clerks, who were both men and women, were available to a huge range of immigrant customers,” said Insana. Fourteen clerks spoke just as many languages: French, Italian, Serbian and Croatian; German, Russian, Greek and Polish

Still Working: Why Pittsburgh Is Really The 'Glass City' Dec 11, 2015

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Walking down Penn Avenue in Garfield, people likely don’t see Jason Forck through the window two stories up as he balances a near-molten glass tumbler at the end of a steel rod.

Still Working: What Comes Next? Remaking A Life In The Mon Valley Dec 04, 2015

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The main building on Carrie Furnace’s 80-acre site in Braddock looks like a giant has just scattered its playthings and stomped off, not too far away, to eat a few goats. Inside the blowing engine house a 48-inch universal plate mill lies in 40- and 50-ton pieces on the concrete floor. A sign hanging at the south end lists the safety guidelines (“6. Be aware of crane movements”). Bill Sharkey sits on a few benches meant for visitors. Sharkey isn’t a visitor, really. He worked as a foreman at Carrie from 1974 to when it shut down in 1982. At its peak, the plant produced 1,250 tons of iron a day to send across the Monongahela River to the Homestead Works and refined into steel. It’s quiet now. The sound of the trains passing by to the north competes with the faint whistle of wind moving through the big doors a volunteer fashioned from found steel. “In the old days it was all noisy—there’s whistles going all the time, steam hissing, ah, there's railroad engines going all the time, moving

Still Working: What It Takes To Keep The Lights On In Western PA Nov 27, 2015

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A black and yellow helmet sits on the floor of Janet Hoover’s kitchen. It’s perched on top of a pair of boots and an old miner’s lamp. The helmet label reads, “Fasloc : Keeps the Roof Over Your Head.”

Still Working: How A 100-Year-Old Navigation System Keeps Pittsburgh Running Nov 20, 2015

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Don Zeiler stands on a wall in the middle of the Monongahela River. In work boots and a bright orange jacket, the lockmaster at Braddock Locks & Dam is dressed for dance. “When you’re dancing with your partner you take a step, they need to know where to go: when I’m doing this, then you do that, then I’ll do this, then you do that. So that’s basically what locking is,” he explained. Rivers are finicky. They twist, they turn, and their water levels vary, so “locking” (not to be confused with the actual dance style, popping and locking) is how a boat moves from one level to the next. Think of a lock as a water elevator, with two sets of doors. A boat steers through one gate, which closes behind it. The lock fills with water. Once it’s high enough, the boat continues out through the second gate. Like dancing, locking a boat is an activity for two. A leader and a lock operator, working at different ends, coordinate the passage of boats through the lock. For their safety, and for the

Hey, Steelers, Where'd You Get That Logo? Nov 13, 2015

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The love Steelers fans have for their team is the stuff of legend: hordes of faithful waving Terrible Towels, wearing logo-emblazoned pajama pants, cheering in one of the nation’s more than 700 Steelers bars. So I figured the best way to learn the back-story of the logo was to go right to the source: Heinz Field, on a Sunday, an hour before kickoff.

They Don't Just Sell Medicine Here, They Make It Nov 06, 2015

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Anchored at the corner of Fifth Avenue and McKee Place in Oakland, Hieber’s Pharmacy sports a glass block window that reads, “We Create Medicine For Your Family.” Inside, white cabinets hold powdered chemicals and a rainbow assortment of empty capsules waiting to be filled. Hieber's is a compounding pharmacy.

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