It’s been 23 years since the saga of the discarded toilet. I lived in Squirrel Hill then, and each day as I drove Downtown to ...

Geography comes first. Close upon the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, one gets a sense of westward flowing waters, but a map of Western Pennsylvania shows the Allegheny flowing ...

To celebrate the beginning of our 20th year, we’ve set out to catalogue the contributions that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have made to the world. The list has grown and grown, and despite our ...

When life events overwhelm me — family health issues, major expenses, needless arguments — I dream about skiing. For me, there is no better escape than soaring down a slope with nothing on my mind ...

It’s a hell of a thing to know your birth coincides with a line of demarcation in your hometown. On one side is prosperity. On the other, ruin. I was born in Youngstown in 1977. At the time, it was an ...

Like it or not, the Carnegie International eclipses everything the Carnegie Museum of Art does. Every director has grumbled about how it commandeers all available resources. But it’s a time-honored ...

Everyone is born with a gift from God. Some people discover their gift, and use it to a positive end. Some discover their gift, but squander it. And others, for one reason or another, never discover ...

When Rachel Sager bought a house, she didn’t know it came with a coal mine. Obscured by woods in her “backyard,” and flanking the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) bike trail, are the sprawling ruins of ...

My twin brother, Allan Block, and I are the third generation in a family business that’s more than 100 years old. My grandfather, Paul Block, was an immigrant from East Prussia, and grew up, through ...

The calamity began at the stroke of midnight on May 10, 1924, when Pittsburgh Street Railway Company employees walked off the job. The streetcar strike threw commuters into a tizzy, and the following ...

It was a snowy day in Pittsburgh in 2024 when a City truck slid into a guardrail. No one was hurt, but it caused risk and damaged the vehicle. Asking “why” yielded a typical answer, “duh, it was icy.” ...

The Pittsburgh region gained about 57,800 jobs between June 2020 and June 2021, a 7.2 percent increase over the year. This fell below the benchmark average of a 7.2 percent gain for this period.