The Paris of Appalachia

So for Thanksgiving I had the pleasure of visiting…Pittsburgh! Gateway to the West, the City of Bridges, home of:

• the mighty Steelers,
• Carnegie Mellon University [my actress grandmother’s alma mater],
• a thriving arts scene including the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Pittsburgh Opera,
• and the dearly departed Three Rivers Stadium, named for the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, whose confluence forms the heart of this sturdy, scrappy city. 

Pittsburgh [like New York City] developed as a port city, albeit an inland one, with a thriving business in trade, exploiting its strategic position between the East and the Midwest, amplified by its access to the Great Lakes. In fact one of Pittsburgh’s sobriquets is Gateway to the West. Another one is Iron City—and the city’s other main (historical*) industry is manufacturing. Iron, steel, glass—all drawing from western Pennsylvania's vast natural reserves of coal, lumber, petroleum…

Which perhaps is what drew the attention of the man who created one of the Pittsburgh area’s best-known treasures, the breathtaking Fallingwater, designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

[I have long had a fascination with FLW’s works—my great-aunt and –uncle lived in one of his Usonian houses in Pleasantville, and my mother told me they were always tripping over architecture students crouched in the bushes, scribbling notes. When I read The Fountainhead I suspected Howard Roark was based on FLW and apparently I’m not the only one! Typically perversely, both Rand and Wright denied it but girlfriend, please. Roark even designs a GAS STATION.]

Apparently the original design called for the "udder-like" pumps
to descend from the ceiling "like mother's milk." Gee, that DOES sound exciting! Or something.

ANYWAY. One of Wright’s guiding design principles was integration, and so he conceived Fallingwater’s interiors as well as her structure, using building materials from the same natural reserves from which Pittsburgh** industry drew.  The same lumber sources, the same copper mines and stones...Wright's magnum opus could have been erected nowhere else but in this particular corner of the world, western Pennsylvania.

Notice how the perspective compels you to look
 through the windows, to the outside.

To walk through Fallingwater’s cantilevered terraces and stone-laid floors is to be immersed in the sounds and smells and feel of the Allegheny Mountains, to be a footfall away from the rushing of the Bear Run. A veritable organic cathedral, the perfect marriage of form and function, created by a modern Daedalus!

*The steel industry is but a shadow of what it was--it went belly-up in the '70s and early '80s, hence the term Rust Belt.

**One of the days I will have to write about Chicago—you gotta admire a city so can-do that the city civil engineers actually REVERSED THE FLOW OF THE RIVER.  Now that is some Midwestern pioneer spirit!