BOXES 90-92: Chicago and Pittsburgh

You weren't expecting a football game to open one of my posts? After my Instamatic was stolen on the Orient Express (see previous post) I was persuaded by my Northwestern friends--and by the excellent pictures they were taking--to get a Single Lens Reflex camera. I ended up getting a Nikon (I suppose it was the F2 model) with two detachable lenses, a standard (I think 55mm) and a telephoto zoom (80 to 200mm); a few years later I added a wide-angle lens (25 or 28mm). It took me quite a while to learn how to use the Nikon effectively: I had to throw away more slides that were out of focus or impossibly under-exposed than I did with my simple point-and-shoot Instamatic. I never became a photographer worthy of my equipment. But sometimes I was lucky to get all the settings right, as with the football shot above, taken at quite some distance from the field; and I could now take photos in much dimmer light. The next several boxes show me experimenting with what the camera could and could not do, though I will spare you the complete failures.

The very first pictures I took were night scenes outside my Evanston apartment: shots that would have been impossible with my Instamatic. I was very happy with my first photo, though now I can't help but think about what a digital camera could achieve in such lighting circumstances. My second shot, the one of the tree, I now find pretty uninteresting, but I do like the shadows in the third. The fourth I've cropped to create a minimal visual interest. But no, I won't be tediously self-critiquing every shot from here on.

My first daylight shot was of two colleagues on the NU campus whose names I've forgotten:

Next, a graduate-student friend, Rosemary Jann, graciously let my take some portrait shots in her carrel. (Both faculty and graduate students had their own study rooms in the new library.) That's an English Dept. colleague, Dave Hill, in the second photo; the fourth is a shot from a library window.

I took one other photo on campus that day--presumably I wanted to see if I could capture a shadowy foreground with the sunlit lakefront and observatory in the back. (As with my Instamatic slides, most of the Nikon slides look better projected on a screen, and I've had to make various modifications of my scans.)

One evening that September the circus was in town--i.e., one of the major circuses was ensconced in the Chicago Stadium (predecessor to the United Center)--and some friends wanted to go down to see it. So my next night shots were of the Chicago skyline:

I took one photo of the crowd at the circus (don't ask me why there are none of any acts). Evidently we were allowed "backstage" to see the horses in their stables, allowing for a better photo.

And then it was football season. I've never been much of a football fan, and had no particular interest in NU's team, but a bunch of my friends were going to an October home game, and I was drawn to it by their promise of thermoses of hot buttered rum, as well as by a beautiful fall day and the opportunity to experiment with my camera. We were sitting midway up in the stands:

Besides the closeup of the players at the top of this post, I got to take other pictures with my zoom lens, including ones of the cheerleaders, the band during halftime and the players returning for the second half. (I've left in a partially head-blocked view of the cheerleaders but will skip over several slightly blurry shots.)

That's Jane Smith, with her husband, Carl, both colleagues in the English Department, in the stands nearby.

The next time I got out the camera was for another festivity--a Halloween party in Pittsburgh. My NU graduate-student friends Phil and Slu Smith had gotten jobs at the University of Pittsburgh, and were planning to throw a costume party for their new colleagues. They invited me to fly out for the holiday weekend--part of the plan was to have an unannounced 'mystery guest' in the midst of the party. (Everyone was to be in heavy disguise.) I was able to buy a wizard's cape at a Chicago theatrical costume store's warehouse sale. (It still comes in handy for Halloween occasions, though I long ago lost the hat that Slu made for me.) Here are Phil and Slu in costume, followed by me out of and in costume, with painted mustache:

I had varying success photographing the guests during the party; cropping helps a little:

The next day Phil and Slu gave me a whirlwind tour of Pittsburgh, a city I had never visited. It's a fascinating place, as I don't need to tell anyone who has lived there, with a good deal of striking architecture and a dizzying layout of curving streets: as I remember it, the convergence of the rivers and the very hilly terrain mean that almost no street remains straight for very long. We started downtown: that's the U.S. Steel Building (1971, Harrison, Abramovitz) on the left and the towers of two art deco masterpieces from the 1930s on the right, the Koppers Building and the Gulf Tower. I think the place where I took the photo is now an Interstate exit ramp.

We visited the Allegheny County Court House, an 1888 triumph by H.H. Richardson:

And also nearby, the Union Trust Building (1916) with a spectacular neo-Flemish-Gothic roof and an equally spectacular skylight dome:

Our next stop is now a mystery to me: an courtyard with columns (part of a museum?), with a statue of a woman holding . . . something, and what looks almost like a painted backdrop of a gothic yet modernistic church with a rose window. If anyone can make an identification, please let me know.

More easily identifiable is our next stop, another H.H. Richardson design, the Emmanuel Episcopal Church (1886):

And then on to a place that was originally a post office in the Allegheny City district of Pittsburgh; in the 1980s it became a Children's Museum, but when we visited, it seems to have been a "Landmarks Museum." In any case, here's Slu hugging an eagle in front of the building, followed by me standing amidst the monumental figures that were originally above the north entrance to the recently-torn-down Manchester Bridge over the Allegheny River.

Perhaps inside the post-office-turned-museum, or elsewhere, I took pictures of a Tiffany window and of the interior of an antique dollhouse. (What else could it be?):

I was fascinated by the hilly terrain of Pittsburgh:

We explored a neighborhood where there were quite a few Victorian-era houses:

And finally we went to the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, a truly astonishing place: a 42-story neo-gothic/art deco structure (completed in the mid-1930s) with, among many interesting features, a set of "Nationality Rooms" on the first floor. These are classrooms, still in use, each designed to represent a nationality that contributed to Pittsburgh's ethnic mix, each constructed with local artisanal woodwork and other crafts, with imported elements from the home countries. For anyone who has spent many years in countless unimaginative classroom spaces, as a student and in my case as college professor, the rooms are not only dazzling but nearly surreal. I don't know why I didn't take photos of every room, except that I was probably running out of film-- the following three pictures are at the end of a roll. I remember several of the rooms I didn't photograph (there were 19 at the time; another dozen have been added to another floor in more recent times): a French room with chairs in Empire style with royal blue upholstery; an Early American room with a big 1600s-style fireplace and a sort of picnic table for seminars. In the first pic below you get a glimpse of the Chinese classroom, including the swinging panels for the blackboard. (Slu is out of focus, but I include the pic anyhow so you can see some details of the room itself.) Next is the German classroom, with Phil presiding:

Most impressive of all was the Syrian-Lebanese classroom, with imported decorative elements so precious that the room is only for display, not actual classes. (As faculty, my friends had a key.) There are no desks or tables on the marble floors but for sitting, a satin-covered divan running around the four walls. The vibe was more sultan's palace than austere place of learning, which was probably why Phil and Slu went for a less academic pose:

Following this weekend amid the mysteries of Pittsburgh I didn't travel anywhere new until a year later (Nashville, then San Francisco). So my next several boxes will cover just Chicago and Cleveland, though I hope they'll still be of some interest.