It was a warm, bright morning on Memorial Day of 2014. The sky was unblemished, and the inhabitants of Windber filled the streets waiting for their annual Memorial Day parade. More people than in past parades squeezed together on sidewalks and lined the streets that surged with excitement. The parade would be different this year. Loud cracks of the snare drum snapped through the air,
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Pittsburgh may be most associated with black and gold, but when it comes to the Irish in the area, they’d paint the city green. Almost from its founding there have been Irish in Pittsburgh. The first arrivals were the Scots-Irish in the 1700s, and then later in the 1800s the Irish Catholics began to arrive. Near the middle of the 1800s, The Great Potato Famine
Read the Full Article →Ah, St. Patrick’s Day. Shamrocks. Green beer. Parades. Rubber boots. For Floyd Hughes, my late grandfather, St. Patrick’s Day always reminded him of rubber boots. In March 1936, Pup-Pup, as his grandchild and great-grandchildren called him, was a 21-year-old shipping clerk for Eastman Kodak in Pittsburgh. A husband and father with a 9-month-old daughter, he lived on Spring Hill and took a streetcar to work
Read the Full Article →For drivers accustomed to straight east-west and north-south roads laid out like grid work, the streets in and around Pittsburgh can pose confusing navigational problems. Due to our many streams and rivers, mountainous terrain, and numerous valleys, most of our roads are circuitous, following the natural lay of the land. In Pittsburgh, this means the road you are on could be more crooked than a
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When a city is located on a river, you expect to find several bridges spanning the waterway. When that city is Pittsburgh, however, you find not just several bridges, but a seemingly innumerable amount of them. One estimate puts the area’s bridge tally at nearly 2,000. Pittsburgh boasts more bridges than Venice, Italy! The area’s rugged terrain, with its deep valleys, creeks, and rivers, would
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Religion in Pittsburgh is as intrinsic as the rivers that flow through the terrain. The first documented evidence of religious influence in Pittsburgh dates back to the Native Americans. When the settlers first arrived here, they found a small hill near what is today Sixth Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh. This knoll had been used by local Native Americans as a burial ground. It is believed
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Greece has made a huge impact on the world. The Greeks have made enormous contributions to architecture, philosophy, theater, politics and government, sports, mathematics, science, and medicine: literally all of Western Culture. Like the diminutive size of their homeland (it’s about the size of Alabama), the Greeks who came to Pittsburgh were few in number when compared to some of their other ethnic counterparts, such
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Many cities in the United States have communities of Arabs. Although not as large as the communities in places such as Detroit, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, Pittsburgh has a small, but thriving enclave of Arabs. The term Arab is a description of people located in Western Asia and North Africa. According to the Arab American National Museum, Arab Americans come from the 22 countries
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If cities have heartbeats, then Pittsburgh’s must thump like an oom pah pah band. Many immigrants have flocked to the Pittsburgh area over the centuries, but no nationality has come to the region in greater numbers than the Germans. According to the U.S. Census of 2000, more people in the Pittsburgh area claim German heritage than any other. The first Germans came to the New
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As everyone knows, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492 in search of a passage to India. Instead, he found the Americas. More than 500 years later we have a slightly different scenario: many Indians are leaving the subcontinent and discovering Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh area in the past has experienced waves of immigration; many came to the region seeking a better future in America than
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