Circles and Cycles – Working the Monongahela River Towboats: A Personal Portrait

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Circles and Cycles – Working the Monongahela River Towboats: A Personal Portrait A river is not defined by its banks. If it were, a simple line drawing would suffice to delineate it. People who work on it and live along its banks tell us what the Monongahela River is: it is about the people as much as the geography. This was a valley of steel and is still a valley of coal. The river defines the char­acter of the valley and affects people in ways they always aren’t...
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Ridgway Historic District

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Ridgway Historic District In 1833, Ridgway was platted as an unincorporated village and named for wealthy Philadelphia Quaker Jacob Ridgway (1768-1843), who owned more than one hundred thousand acres in north­central Pennsylvania. The village, originally located in Jefferson County, became the Elk County seat upon the county’s creation in 1843. Ridgway, incor­porated as a borough in 1881, emerged as an important...
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Lorraine Apartments

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lorraine Apartments The Lorraine Apartments was among Philadelphia’s earliest high-rise apartment houses. Designed by Philadelphia architect Willis G. Hale (1848-1907), the ten-story building, built in 1892-1893 in the heart of the burgeoning nouveau riche neighborhood of North Broad Street, exemplified the rapidly changing possibilities of urban life that swept across the country at the time. Its innovations...
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World War II Connellsville Canteen

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on World War II Connellsville Canteen Within days of the declaration of World War II in December 1941, American troops began mobilizing, moving swiftly across the country on their way to the front. Embracing a strong need to be a part of the war effort on the home front, many towns and cities organized canteens at their railroad depots to serve troop trains passing through. At the war’s outbreak, Con­nellsville, in Fayette...
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John A. Brashear (1840-1920)

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on John A. Brashear (1840-1920) Somewhere beneath the stars is work which you alone were meant to do. Never rest until you have found it,” proclaims a plaque at a small museum on Pittsburgh’s South Side. For the author, John Alfred Bras­hear (1840-1920), the stars were his life’s work. At the age of nine, encouraged by his grandfather, Brashear peered through a telescope with a lens ground from fire­hardened...
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Along the Pennsylvania Trails of History

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Along the Pennsylvania Trails of History Fallingwater, designed in 1935 by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Edgar J. Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh, is an American icon, acknowledged worldwide as an architectural masterpiece. Situated above a waterfall on Bear Run, a mountain stream the Kaufmanns loved, at Mill Run in Fayette County, Fallingwater helped define twentieth-century modernism. Upon its completion, the Kaufmann commission became...
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Art with a Purpose: Pennsylvania’s Museum Extension Project, 1935-1943

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Art with a Purpose: Pennsylvania’s Museum Extension Project, 1935-1943 Like other relief programs launched during the Great Depression under the aegis of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the goal of federal arts programs of the 1930s was two-fold: to rescue unemployed Americans from poverty and to produce something of public benefit. One of the unintended byproducts was controversy. In 1937, the Federal Art and Theatre Project unintentionally...
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Rediscovering the People’s Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Rediscovering the People’s Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices On a February morning in 1937, artist George Warren Rickey (1907-2002) and a group of four men met at the post office in Selinsgrove, Snyder County. Armed with cloth-covered rolling pins, the men attached Rickey’s mural entitled Susquehanna Trail to one of the lobby’s end walls. After six hours, they transformed the entire blank white wall, from marble wainscoting to ceiling, into a...
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The Architect, The Icon, and The Artist: Welcome to a Visual Celebration of Vision

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Architect, The Icon, and The Artist: Welcome to a Visual Celebration of Vision Shortly after its completion in 1937, Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Edgar J. and Liliane S. Kaufmann above a mountain stream loved by the Pittsburgh couple and their son Edgar Jr., was lauded by critics as an icon of modern American architecture. Perched precariously over a waterfall on Bear Run, near Mill Run in Fayette County, in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, it was...
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The “War History” of Corporal Funk

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The “War History” of Corporal Funk Share...
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