Pittsburgh Trip

Pittsburgh has had a bad reputation for may years. I read somewhere that it’s been called “Hell with the lid off.” I was a bit apprehensive when my brother decided to move his family there five years ago to work at the Amazon office there (they are pretty strong in speech processing which is my brother’s area). It turns out that all the negative views about Pittsburgh are quite outdated in my opinion. We decided to visit my brother there for a few days in October and we discovered that Pittsburgh is quite a modern city with many interesting places and definitely worth a visit.

One of the most interesting things about the city is that it has three rivers: the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio River (where the two other rivers meet) as you can see from the picture. My favorite place there is the Point State Park with the famous fountain which is where the three rivers meet. It is a lot of fun to walk in the park but also walk over the pedestrian bridges to the other sides of the rivers. We stayed on the northern side (North Shore) and had to cross the Allegheny River on foot to get to the park. It was cheaper to stay there than in the center of town except when the Pirates or the Steelers play because both of their stadiums are on the North Shore). We could also walk across the Monongahela River and get to the Duquesne Incline where we took the funicular to get to Mt Washington where you get beautiful views of the city (that’s where the post picture was taken from.  There are also a few restaurants there where you can eat and see the city below. We ate at the Grandview Saloon. Food was pretty decent and we lucked out on the weather and were able to eat on the balcony which was a lot of fun.

From the Point State Park you can easily walk to the center of Pittsburgh which looks similar to the other large cities in the Northeast. There are several interesting buildings there and many nice squares. Te building in the picture on the left I believe is the Union Trust Building. You can also find amazing pictures of the inside of the building on Google Maps. We didn’t go inside but if I had seen the Google Maps pictures we would certainly have tried. The Market Square and the Mellon Square are my favorite. The Market Square is much more lively with several restaurants and activities on the square. The Mellon Square is more interesting architecturally but not very busy when we were there.

As you can imagine, Pittsburgh is still considered the Steel Industry center. One of the buildings we checked out is the US Steel Tower which still houses the headquarters of US Steel (second largest steel producer in the US according to Wikipedia. It used to be Pittsburgh’s tallest buildings (64 story tall). The building contains over 44,000 U.S. tons (40,000 metric tons) of structural steel, and almost an acre of office space per floor (see Wikipedia where you can find a lot of interesting facts about the building). Currently, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is the largest tenant. Hence, their corporate sign is at the top of the building. There is another square across the building called Mellon Green.

Since we were staying on the North Shore, we decided to explore the area around the hotel. We found a couple of interesting areas. We went to an Aviary (aviary is kind of a zoo with only birds, with lots of interesting birds (definitely worth a visit). For me, the flamingos made the biggest impression.  We also visited Randyland which is a kind of an art museum and according to some it is regarded as one of America’s most colorful public art landmarks. It was created by a very interesting character called Randy Gilson. We had the fortune of meeting Randy there and he shared with us hist story. He bought the building that is Randyland today for $10K in 1995 on a credit card when the area was very poor and dominated by drug activities. He started an effort to improve the area by creating gardens eventually planting over 800 of them mostly working with kids in the area. Today, the area has been drastically improved and looks beautiful. The museum on his property is based on interesting objects (many of them toys) he has collected over the years and according to Wikipedia is among the most photographed places on Instagram.

 Another must see place in Pittsburgh is the Strip District. Beautiful area to walk around with many restored brownstones. There are several nice restaurants in the area and many stores (especially if you are looking for Pirates or Steelers merchandise). Interestingly, we were there Saturday evening and surprisingly it wasn’t as busy as I expected (maybe it felt that way because we were in Pittsburgh right after going to New York city where similar districts are much busier). Interestingly, there were alcohol stands on the sidewalks and the alcohol seemed to be free flowing. We were able to find parking without a problem (which is often an issue). We did try to check out the Greek store (Stamoulis Brothers) but unfortunately it was closed by the time we got there. I hear from my brother that it has a great selection.