Pittsburgh: Fallingwater in the Forest, Glass Hothouses and the City That Reinvented Itself
Drive 90 minutes to Fallingwater where Frank Lloyd Wright cantilevered a house over a waterfall in 1939 for the Kaufmann family, walk through Phipps Conservatory Victorian glass hothouses in Schenley Park free on Sundays, trace the Heinz history center largest history museum in Pennsylvania covering French and Indian War to steel age, browse Lawrenceville galleries and restaurants in the fastest-gentrifying Pittsburgh neighborhood, understand the Pittsburgh Renaissance urban renewal program that cleared the smoke and rebuilt downtown, and fly into Pittsburgh International Airport where landing fees are among the lowest of any major American hub.
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Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Schenley Park, an 1893 Victorian glass and iron conservatory built for the Schenley International Exposition and donated to the city by Henry Phipps, is one of the premier botanical institutions in America and a model for sustainable building design. The conservatory has been expanded with a series of new glass structures designed to meet the highest LEED and Living Building Challenge environmental standards, including the Center for Sustainable Landscapes, the most sustainably certified building in the world at the time of its completion. The seasonal flower shows, particularly the Holiday Show and the Spring Flower Show, draw large crowds. Admission is free on Friday evenings. The surrounding Schenley Park, donated to Pittsburgh by Mary Schenley in 1889, is the central green space of the Oakland neighborhood and contains the Phipps, Flagstaff Hill outdoor amphitheater, tennis courts, and extensive trail networks.
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Fallingwater and Frank Lloyd Wright
Fallingwater, the house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for retail magnate Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and completed in 1939 at Bear Run in the Laurel Highlands 90 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, is considered the greatest work of American architecture and was so named by the American Institute of Architects in a 1991 poll of architecture faculty. Wright designed the house cantilevered over a waterfall on Bear Run, integrating the sound and sight of the falling water into daily experience of the interior. The Kaufmann family donated the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963. Tickets for house tours sell out months in advance and must be reserved online. Kentuck Knob, another Wright house in the Laurel Highlands nearby, and Polymath Park, a compound of Wright-designed houses available for overnight rental, complete a Wright tour of the region. The Mill Run township setting in a dense Pennsylvania hardwood forest intensifies the experience of approaching the house.
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Senator John Heinz History Center
The Senator John Heinz History Center in the Strip District, the largest history museum in Pennsylvania at 370,000 square feet, occupies a former icehouse and cold storage warehouse and documents Western Pennsylvania history from the pre-colonial era through the present. The museum includes the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum, covering Pittsburgh professional and amateur sports with championship memorabilia, and permanent exhibitions on the French and Indian War, the steel industry, immigration, and the diverse communities that built the region. The Heinz family legacy in Pittsburgh extends beyond the history center to the H.J. Heinz Company, founded by Henry John Heinz in Sharpsburg in 1869, which grew into a global condiment empire with the famous 57 Varieties slogan, though there were actually hundreds of products. Heinz Field on the North Shore, renamed Acrisure Stadium in 2022, was home to the Steelers for two decades. The Heinz family philanthropy funded dozens of Pittsburgh institutions.
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Lawrenceville Arts District
Lawrenceville, a mile-long neighborhood of brick rowhouses along Butler Street in the river valley northeast of downtown Pittsburgh, was an Irish and Eastern European working-class community for most of its history and has gentrified more rapidly than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood since the 2000s. The neighborhood attracted artists and small businesses when rents were low, and the resulting cultural energy attracted investment that has now substantially raised property values and displaced the original population dynamics. Gallery Row on Butler Street presents contemporary and emerging art. The Arsenal Bowl bar occupies the former arsenal building. Construction of residential buildings has been constant since 2010. Pittsburgh architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, responsible for Apple Store worldwide design, is based in Wilkes-Barre but has major Pittsburgh operations. Lawrenceville has become the benchmark example in discussions of Pittsburgh revitalization but also of gentrification displacement tension.
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Pittsburgh Renaissance Urban Renewal
Pittsburgh in 1945 was one of the most polluted cities on earth, with air quality so poor that streetlights operated at noon and white shirts turned gray during the daily commute from smoke and soot produced by the steel mills. The Pittsburgh Renaissance, a collaboration between Republican Mayor David Lawrence and Democratic business leader Richard King Mellon beginning in 1945, cleared the Hill District for the Civic Arena, demolished the Point neighborhood for Point State Park, and installed smoke controls that transformed air quality within a decade. The program was the first major postwar urban renewal effort in America. The Renaissance displaced over 8,000 predominantly Black residents from the Hill District, a community that had been the center of Black cultural life in western Pennsylvania, for the Civic Arena that was demolished in 2011. This displacement is a defining trauma in Pittsburgh Black community history. A second Renaissance from 1999 addressed economic diversification from steel toward knowledge economy.
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Pittsburgh Practical Guide
Pittsburgh International Airport, 18 miles west of downtown, was redesigned by Tasso Katselas and opened in 1992 as a model airside-landside airport design that was widely copied but underutilized due to the collapse of US Airways Pittsburgh hub after 2001. The airport now operates without a hub carrier and is served by major airlines with direct flights to 70 destinations. Pittsburgh airport parking and fees are among the lowest of major American airports. The Pittsburgh Light Rail system, called the T, serves downtown and select South Hills suburbs. Rideshare and bus cover the city. Driving between Oakland, the Strip District, and downtown is standard. Pittsburgh is a city of hills requiring vertical movement between neighborhoods via staircases, the only city in the US with more public staircase steps than San Francisco. Spring and fall are ideal weather seasons. Pittsburgh hotel rates are modest. The city is within a 6-hour drive of New York, Washington DC, Cleveland, Columbus, and Philadelphia.