We woke up to a gray, drizzling day, looking out over the outdoor patio at our B&B. Not a place for breakfast, clearly, at this time of year. Still, we had a very pleasant breakfast indoors, and left armed with ample instructions for a tour of downtown Pittsburgh.
A twenty-minute bus ride from our B&B brought us right into the center of the city, where we found ourselves in a tree-lined street...
... surrounded by tall buildings, old and new, in a rather pleasing mix. Plenty of pedestrian traffic--notable, always, to those of us mostly deprived of such social interaction in the City of Angels. We spent a good while wandering around the city center streets, before heading down to the Convention Center which received so much publicity last week, with the officials of the G-20 meeting here. We walked down under the building along this pleasant, curving walkway...
... between flowing streams of water to a spectacular view of the river and the city beyond. Here's a view of the Convention Center...
... from one of the bridges, and an artsy composition of old and new...
... by yours truly with this Canon PowerShot. There's a good deal of this contrast in the city, where old, raised rail lines and the rusting steel and peeling facades of structures dating from the great steel days are juxtaposed with modern and contemporary development. I liked this sign...
... for the Association for the Improvement of the Poor. Still plenty of work to be done in that area!
We walked on down Penn Street from the Convention Center, passing up on the Heinz History Center for lack of time rather than interest. Further on, the street becomes a long, straggling food market, with grocery and spice stores, bakeries... and plenty of fish mongers. Our B&B hostess, Liz, had recommended lunch at the Penn Fish Market, so we sought it out and found it rather towards the end of the commercial part of the street, but well worth the walk. At the fish counter...
... I think I have never seen larger shrimp than these (should have put a hand into the picture, to give a truer sense of size!) And here's the small--but crowded--restaurant area. Come here for the fish sandwiches! We had a cod wrap. Excellent!
We walked off our lunch, trudging back along Penn and past the Convention Center to the Andy Warhol Bridge...
... from which we could look back over the downtown area, and forward...
... to the other side, where we found the Andy Warhol Museum, six floors of galleries devoted to the life and work of Pittsburgh's most famous artist son. It's a nice museum, but I came away not much further impressed by Warhol, the artist. (No pictures allowed, I fear.) He seems to me very much the artist of the late 20th century, whose intentional superficiality reflected much about his time. My favorite was the "Silver Clouds" gallery, a small space filled with two dozen inflated, silvery pillows which floated cheerfully everywhere and invited the childish impulse to pad them around like big balloons. Oh, and I also like the stuffed Great Dane--a huge, regal, handsome creature. Among the many artifacts that Warhol liked to collect were the products of the art of taxidermy. Otherwise, plenty of Warhols everywhere, from Marilyns and Elvises and Jackies, to giant skulls, electric chairs and car crashes. You've seen 'em.
The good people at the Warhol front desk were kind enough to call us a cab, and we returned to our B&B later afternoon for a rest. Ellie took some pictures...
We took a twenty-minute walk to our recommended restaurant, the Casbah, had an excellent dinner served by a charming waiter, and returned to the B&B for a good night's sleep.
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