Old Man River

Miracle of Pittsburgh

Old Bucs

Old Ballpark Blues

Old Crossing

When Detroit Made Postcards of Pittsburgh

Is that the Strip to Hill incline way off in the distance? (click to enlarge)  I still think we could build a 21st century green incline to reconnect the old arena site to the Strip.  Put a grocery store up there, and ask the hip flatlander residents of the strip to go up the hill for groceries. 

And if there's still any talk of burying the crosstown, we should just replace the Igloo with a big mound of green and recreate Grant's Hill a couple hundred yards to the east...as a common space like days of old (way, way old). 

Old Writing Machine

Simplicity is superiority!

Old Pittsburgh Gas?

Below is an excerpt from "The Story of Gasoline" (1927) produced by the Bureau of Mines "Pittsburgh Experiment Station."  This clip is about 3 minutes, with ragtime music added.  The entire film is 43 minutes.

I wonder if the filling station in this clip is the Pittsburgh original -- the world's first?  It doesn't match the image from 1913, but that one doesn't look like it would have lasted into the 1920s, and this one is similar in terms of the orientation to the road.  

Did a trolley once run up Baum?

Here is the entire 43 minutes on YouTube. Worth making the kids sit through.

Old Europe

My friend Bob's color photography...Europe in the early 1950's:

El Retiro is my favorite...it's as though one of the guys sitting on the top row just said something funny, and the others are looking back to laugh with him.

Almost looks like these guys are checking their phones.

Here's the car he drove all over Europe...when he wasn't flying Bob Hope and Danny Kaye and various ingénues around as head of entertainment for the US Army over there.