Phipps Conservatory is open Friday evenings until 10 p.m. The darkness and the relatively few visitors can sometimes give one the eerie sensation of being lost in a jungle filled with surrealistic Fräbel glass art.
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The Mary Schenley Memorial Fountain in Oakland, with the Cathedral of Learning in the background. Both have recently been restored. Somewhere underneath that fountain lies a buried bridge, left there when a hollow was filled in to make Schenley Plaza.
Phipps Conservatory is being held up as an example of what makes Pittsburgh a model to the world. Troops of presidents and prime ministers will shortly descend on it, and yesterday the place was crawling with State Department suits flashing their badges and working out the thorny details of who stands where for the photo opportunities.
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It would be hard to think of a better showpiece for Pittsburgh. This is one of the world’s most beautiful glasshouses, a rare relic of classic Victorian Gothic conservatory architecture. Yet it has adapted to the modern age with a new entry and a spectacular tropical forest, both of which are remarkable for their use of “green” technology. The new entry, seen here, harmonizes well with the original greenhouses; yet the design is clearly a product of our own age. Pittsburgh can help teach the world how to make the old new again; and perhaps, in teaching that lesson, we can learn it better ourselves.
Hans Godo Fräbel is hard to pin down. Sometimes his style is abstract, sometimes breathtakingly realistic—or perhaps the word is surrealistic, with realistic figures in impossible situations. In every style his glass is impeccably precise. Dale Chihuly’s works seemed to grow organically from the soil of Phipps Conservatory; in the same setting, Fräbel’s glass almost seems to have been generated by a computer incapable of imperfection.
Everything old Pa Pitt remembers about Col. Alexander Leroy Hawkins is inscribed on the Spanish-American War Monument in Schenley Park. No one seems to think of him today, but he was obviously all the rage in 1899, when he died at sea. He was a hero of the Spanish-American War; he died during the the subsequent Philippine Insurrection, when the ungrateful natives, entirely disregarding the proven fact that the United States was a much nicer colonial power than Spain, attempted to set up their own republican government on their own terms, forcing the Americans to crush all resistance in order to guarantee them a republican form of government.
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Mark Twain was one of the most vocal opponents of “American imperialism,” and he used the now-familiar term “quagmire” to describe our involvement in the Philippines:
I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.
Robert Burns stands guard in front of the Victoria Room at Phipps Conservatory. Schenley Park is full of unexpected statues around every corner.
Tucked behind Phipps Conservatory, this grand little building houses an auditorium, some classrooms, and a huge portrait of Henry Phipps given by his friend Andrew Carnegie.
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The delightful fountain in front is a recent installation, but looks like it belongs with the building.
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Oakland, Pittsburgh’s intellectual heart, is the third-largest central business district in Pennsylvania, after center-city Philadelphia and downtown Pittsburgh. Here we see the compact skyline of the medical and university district from the Panther Hollow Bridge.
It must be spring, because Phipps Conservatory is full of daffodils, tulips, grape hyacinths, and tourists.
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Hye Jin Lee, a student at Carnegie Mellon, has woven colorful patterns into the fence along the Junction Hollow Bridge in Oakland.
