An examination of the long history of the Jewish people reveals immigration to many lands across the globe. Over the millennia, whether by force or by necessity, that Diaspora has left the world with communities of Jews scattered all over the world. Pittsburgh is no exception as Jewish people have lived here since the 1800’s. The exact time when Jews began to come to Pittsburgh
Read the Full Article →Opinion by Julie Long Drive a half-hour outside of downtown Pittsburgh and you’ll find yourself in the country. It’s one of the wonderful things about Pittsburgh, in my opinion, that we can enjoy the rural life and still be so close to the city (or vice versa for you city dwellers). If you head north on Rt. 28, then west on Rt. 910, you’ll come
Read the Full Article →Not long ago, the U.S. Census bureau released information indicating that Pennsylvania leads all states in the share of homeowners who have lived on their property for more than 30 years. A statistic even more revealing of Pennsylvanians’ propensity for sinking deep roots finds that 78 percent of the state’s residents were born here. In this category, we rank second to Louisiana. Having never been
Read the Full Article →Liz Dunn, 25, had always been an active person. “I snowboarded and played soccer,” said the Warren, Pennsylvania native, and she still is even though a car accident five years ago left her with a spinal cord injury. On September 12, Liz will compete in her first 5K race, the 15th Annual President’s Challenge Run/Walk/Wheel, hosted by the Western Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association (WPTLA). The
Read the Full Article →In 2003, CBS News ran a segment on a California wine called Charles Shaw that was selling phenomenally well. The reason? Prior to the report, Charles Shaw’s Shiraz had beaten out 2,300 other wines to garner the gold medal at the Annual International Eastern Wine Competition. The wine was pretty tasty and cost a mere $1.99 a bottle. When CBS spotlighted the inexpensive wine, its
Read the Full Article →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,
Read the Full Article →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
Read the Full Article →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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