Day 35: Pittsburgh

Since our friends and hosts Kirstin and Will were working on Friday, Dave and I had to entertain ourselves in Pittsburgh. We drove around for a little while just looking. We ended up in the Strip District, which is where lots of shops and restaurants are located. We began by getting some lunch at Primanti Brothers, which is a legendary sandwich place. They sell the original "Pittsburgh-style sandwich" which is two slices of crusty bread that they cut right there, lots of meat, a few slices of cheese, a handful of their homemade cole slaw, and a gigantic handful of french fries. That's right. French fries right there on my sandwich. It was fantastic!

After lunch, we continued to roam around the Strip District and found an awesome Italian supermarket called the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company (“Penn Mac”). It was a huge market with lots of pastas, fresh produce, fresh meats, handmade sausages of all kinds, and weird little regional staples. We decided that Dave would make one of his signature dishes (spaghetti with olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, raisins, and olives) for dinner the next night, and this was the perfect place to shop for it.

We decided to spend the rest of the afternoon at the Andy Warhol Museum.



While I was not permitted to take pictures inside the museum, rest assured that it was a great museum. We learned about his life as well as his art. We also learned about who his influences were and who he influenced. One room in the museum featured silver helium-filled mylar pillows that would float around the room directed by strategically placed fans. It was quite nifty. The museum also presented some pretty great multimedia presentations that Warhol had made in conjunction with the Velvet Underground.

By the time we finished and headed back to the house, Kirstin and Will had returned home from work. We decided that instead of cooking dinner, we’d head to the Church Brew Works.


This place was wacky. It was a 1902 church that was converted to a restaurant in 1996.


Having been raised Catholic, I was definitely feeling weird about this. It was a bizarre experience for me. When I looked up toward where the altar should be, there stood the steel and copper brewery tanks.



For dinner, Dave and I chose the Pittsburgh salad, which is a green salad with about a half pound of hot Steak-um-style meat on top smothered in cheese. Oh, that's right. There's french fries. ON the salad. You read correctly, my people. There are french fries on the crazy Steak-um salad. It was amazing, and I think I almost had a coronary right there on the spot.

At one point during dinner, Kirstin got the hiccoughs and showed us her method for getting rid of them.


Hmm.

The outside of the building was quite lovely.



But there was a disturbing view as well.


After dinner, Will took us all on his evening tour of the city. We headed up Mount Washington to a terrific scenic lookout. The first thing I spotted was this cool statue of a Seneca warrior named Guyasuta meeting with George Washington.


The statue is called “Point of View” but it looks more like there is about to be a historically disturbing intimate moment here. I’m just saying.

We also got to see the beautiful night skyline of Pittsburgh.



Oh, it was just gorgeous. At this point, I think I was halfway to being in love with this city. There was a Pirates home game in play at PNC Park and we could see it a little bit from where we were. That was neat.


Here’s a little something for Peter Geddes.


Here’s Pittsburgh’s entry in the Theater of Weird Signs.


This one was a symbol on a paper towel dispenser. It was actually recommending that one use one’s forearm, not one’s fingertips, to press down on the bar that releases the paper towels. Wow.

We wandered about a bit more before heading back to the house and crashing.