Home Turf Tourists – Pittsburgh
Moving to suburban Philly after college, I got a lot of flack about being from Western Pa. “Pittsburgh? That’s not a city!” And then I moved to New York for graduate school. You can just imagine what I heard. Yet, when getting together with my childhood friends, I can think of no more fitting gathering spot than the city of our youth. With a wealth of museums, parks, shopping districts, restaurants and bars Pittsburgh offers both the casual visitor and hardcore tourist a plethora of things to do.
This summer Marilee, Nickie, Ann, Jen and I revisited the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest American museum devoted to a single artist. Want to see Elvis, the Last Supper, Silver Clouds or Brillo Boxes writ large? The Warhol’s got them as well as 4,000 other works of his art.
Along with a love of New York, the Velvet Underground, eccentricity, art and cats, the late pop artist and I share a birthday, August 6. Thus, I found it quite fitting to be there, admiring the best of Andy and his “Wild Raspberries” cookbook, less than two weeks before “our” special day.
A short ride up the Duquesne Incline brought us to observation platform on Mount Washington. From there we gazed out at the three rivers, ball parks, Carnegie Science Museum, the Point and skyline. A few feet away on Grandview Avenue we had a wealth of fine-dining-with-a-view options, including such standbys as the Tin Angel and the Le Mont.
Back on river level we wandered around the Strip District. Once home to factories and mills, produce and meat wholesalers, the Strip now houses bars and restaurants as well as cookware, coffee, book, antique and tchotchke shops. It also hosts a variety of outdoor street markets where we could root through stacks of Myron Cope’s gold-and-black “Terrible Towel” as well as Steelers, Pirates, Penguins and “Pittsburghese” t-shirts.
Back in Shadyside, our home base for the weekend, we shopped and dined along Walnut Street. The tree-lined street offered a pleasant mix of independent boutiques such as Kawaii, The Picket Fence and Shadyside Variety Store and upscale chains such as Apple, Banana Republic and Williams-Sonoma. We walked away with lighter wallets and larger credit card bills but also with some great finds, including a new Prince racquet from Tennis Village.
The best part of visiting Pittsburgh was, and always is, the opportunity to spend time with dear friends whom I could never see often enough.
