{"id":4775,"date":"2014-12-11T20:59:05","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T20:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/?p=4775"},"modified":"2015-01-09T17:36:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T22:36:00","slug":"the-stunning-beauty-of-pittsburgh-at-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/2014\/12\/11\/the-stunning-beauty-of-pittsburgh-at-night\/","title":{"rendered":"The stunning beauty of Pittsburgh at night"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fifth <\/a>
Fifth Avenue at night, circa 1935 . (Pittsburgh Press photo) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"The <\/a>
The Liberty Bridge, circa 1955. (Pittsburgh Press photo) <\/div> <\/div>
\"Penn <\/a>
Penn Station, circa 1935. (Pittsburgh Press photo) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Downtown, <\/a>
Downtown, looking west, circa 1955. (Pittsburgh Press photo) <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

Earlier this week, one of the more senior members of the Digs staff stood with a younger colleague on Mt. Washington and watched as the sun set and darkness fell over the city below.<\/p>\n

\u201cPittsburgh at night reminds me of a Christmas gift I got in the 1960s,\u201d the nostalgic, older staff member said. \u201cIt was called the Visible Man. It was a plastic model of a transparent guy. You could see through the skin to everything inside \u2014 the skeleton, all the organs. The heart, the liver, the colon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat sounds disgusting,\u201d the colleague replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot if you\u2019re a 10-year-old kid. Kids love to see the guts of things, to see how they work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh at night is like that, he continued while his colleague rolled her eyes. Darkness reveals the guts of the thing \u2014 \u00a0headlights surging along boulevards, the \u201cT\u201d smoothly gliding along a bridge over the Mon River, hundreds of office windows glowing, pedestrians struggling against a cold wind as they cross the illuminated Smithfield Street bridge.<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh is the Visible City.<\/p>\n

\u201cOk,\u201d the colleague said. \u201cI get it. Only Pittsburgh is much cooler than the Visible Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

At its best, Pittsburgh is an elegant marriage of geography, human engineering and architecture. We\u2019ve built a magnificent downtown in a fairly small place. It\u2019s framed by two rivers that become one and is bordered by a perch called Mt. Washington, on which we can stand and look with amazement at this place we call home.<\/p>\n

The city is most magnificent after sunset. This is something photographers have understood for decades.<\/p>\n

(A new\u00a0PG gallery of contemporary pictures<\/a>\u00a0reflects the stunning, unusual beauty of today\u2019s Golden Triangle.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The PG archive contains four folders labeled \u201cPittsburgh at night.\u201d Inside each are dozens of images. We picked but a few to show you here \u2014 these seemed to be more unusual views of the city. None are dated, but we took educated guesses that the pictures were made in the 1930s and 1950s.<\/p>\n

Which means they pre-date the Visible Man. We found a copy on eBay, by the way. We now have a Christmas gift for our younger colleague.<\/p>\n

Sssshhhh!<\/em> Don\u2019t tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At its best, Pittsburgh is an elegant marriage of geography, human engineering and architecture.<\/p>\n

Look at the picturesThe stunning beauty of Pittsburgh at night<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4777,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[946],"tags":[975,1024,1197,987,1029,1039,1040],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Pittsburgh-at-night-2.jpg?fit=1080%2C848&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4,"url":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/2014\/12\/10\/pittsburgh-a-foggy-city\/","url_meta":{"origin":4775,"position":0},"title":"Pittsburgh, a foggy city","date":"December 10, 2014","format":"gallery","excerpt":"\"That must have been before Pittsburgh was 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