Pittsburgh’s Park of a Century

Currently ranked first as the Most Livable City by the Rand-McNally annual survey, Pittsburgh is reveling in media exposure comparable to the boosterism of the town of Zenith which writer Sinclair Lewis satirized in his novel, Babbit. Accompanying the zealous, self-proclaimed promotion, however, has been a healthy dose of self­-examination, with the city’s less enviable qualities suddenly...
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Against All Odds: Chevalier Jackson, Physician and Painter

After he had observed his seventieth birth­day, Dr. Chevalier Jackson described downtown Pittsburgh of 1865, his birthplace, as dark, gloomy, and dirty. His recollec­tions of 1888, the year he es­tablished a medical practice in an old tailor shop on Sixth Avenue, were particularly vivid. All winter long we lived as in a dark, cold, damp cellar. The sun was visible, on an average, four days in a...
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