I've said
before that the Eliza
Furnace Trail, more commonly known as the Jail Trail, has a lot of
beautiful graffiti on it. This fall, Static-Free
sponsored an awesome mural on the trail. Yesterday I finally had a
chance to take pictures of it.
Here are a few detail shots from the mural. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions of all the pictures.
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Last weekend I
was trying to get a good picture of a mural in the Strip District. It
was a Sprout
Fund special: Bright colors, painted way up high, and very
literal. Since much of the mural was devoted to an almost
photographic representation of the bridge it's located next to, I
wanted a shot of the mural and the bridge together. I was running all
over downtown and the strip trying to find the right angle, but I
couldn't quite pull it off. It's all good, because in the process,
I found a terrific mural I hadn't seen before.
On the north side, between River Road and the Allegheny River, is a rails to trails bike path. Next to the trail, on the base of a huge overpass (for 279), there's a Pittsburgh-themed mural painted by students from Oliver High. The panels of the mural cover a huge range, from a picture of people in line for peanuts, to the history of the region, to a panel featuring a water-nymph. And hey, right there in the middle of the middle panel? The very same bridge that was in that other mural. I guess it's hard to have a mural without it in this neighborhood.
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Click on any of the images for a larger version. Because I was standing about 5 feet below the bottom of the mural, the pics came out of the camera with a lot of skew due to the angle. Aggressive photoshopping made the images square again and I think the results are ok, but then I'm not a serious photographer.
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In Oakland, on Forbes Ave,, where it, the Boulevard
of the Allies, and the Parkway don't-quite-intersect in an unholy,
confusing nexus, there's a mural painted under an overpass.
T. K. Mundok painted it, though unfortunately, it looks like others
have added graffiti on top. Still, it's a pretty impressive piece of
work, and literally thousands of people drive by it every day. I have
to admit, I didn't notice the mural until recently, probably because
the stretch leading up to the mural is an attention-grabbing mishmash
of a blind curve, a merge, and 3 lanes of heavy traffic. Come to
think of it, this might be the last place I'd want a mural that could
distract people. ]]>
At
18th and Quarry on the South Side Slopes, there's a mural celebrating
the South Side. According to the neighborhood association,
it was painted by Richard Bach. It fits into the "hyper-realistic
panorama" class of murals, showing people from all over the South Side hanging out, doing their thing, and generally having a good time. Not much more to say except that the mural, and perhaps the South Side itself,
deserves bonus points for featuring a blacksmith (see far left of the pic)
along with the more mundane shop types.
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Muralists caught in the act! On Murray Ave. near its intersection with Forward Ave. in Squirrel Hill, Leslie Ansley and Monique Luck are painting a mural they've named "All in a Day." The mural depicts scenes from Squirrel Hill: the clock on the JCC up the street, the sign, and the local high school (Allderdice) are all represented, to name just a few pieces. The artists have another mural (called Life in Motion) on the North Side. Both murals are part of the Sprout Fund's public art project.
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As summer starts to wind down and we begin to get bored of the
Olympics (hey, not our fault - NBC's coverage sucked [again]), our
thoughts return to baseball. How are those Pirates doing anyway?
Best not to ask. Let's instead talk about the Pirates' glorious
history. At the intersection of 2nd Avenue and Ross St. downtown,
under the bridge (Boulevard of the Allies is passing above), there's a
mural of 14 of the most famous Pirates.
Getting a reasonable picture of the whole mural seems to require standing in the middle of the road. But then the traffic lights block some of the mural. Here are the missing pieces:
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Who are the baseball players? I don't follow baseball and I haven't lived in Pittsburgh all that long, so I don't know. (As you can see from the picture, there's a plaque, but all it explains is that the mural is a gift from the Art Institute to the city.) So I've started asking around. Here's what I've got so far, from right to left:
By the way, as Stewart also observed, the clock and scoreboard in the left side of the mural are from Forbes Field (long demolished, but a picture survives).
As always, click on the pics for larger versions.
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Click on the images for larger versions.
On Penn Avenue, between 21st and 20th, there's a mural on the second floor of the side of a bar that says "Welcome to the Strip." The mural is right in the heart of the strip, a stone's throw from the best of the produce markets and restaurants in the area. From the picture, you might think that the buildings around the mural are about to fall down, but I can tell you they've looked about the same for years now.
The strip is a bazaar in the true old-world sense: merchants from a mishmash of cultures offering their wares in the simplest way possible. There's no yuppy light fixtures or froufrou furniture (well, ok, there's some at the froufrou furniture store) to create a "shopping experience." In other words, you see what you get, you get what you pay for, and if you don't like the price, you negotiate. Back in the day, 61C's office was in the strip, and we'd usually make time to grab lunch from one of the local places (the neighborhood had Vietnamese, Italian, Caribbean, and Japanese food, with Thai, Indian, and a brew pub close by). By the way, the strip has an ultra-hip and flashy web site which totally fails to convey the feel of the place (in fact, it seems to focus on only the yuppiest aspects).
And of course, click on the picture for a larger version of the mural.
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On Butler St. in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood, there's a mural that states, definitively (note the double exclamation points), that Lawrenceville is alive. And strangely enough, the mural is correct. Lawrenceville, after years of depression after the steel mills left, has become the new happening spot in town (at least if you're a hipster). But where hipsters tread, normal people soon follow (if only for the ironic t-shirts and art galleries), and slowly but surely the shops along the piece of Butler St. near the Strip District are being renovated.
On the stretch of Butler where this mural is found, there's a car wash, a field of oil tanks, and a bunch of depressed-looking houses (it must be hard to keep the house looking good when you live across the street from a bunch of soul-sucking oil tanks). The hard part for me is figuring out whether the people who painted the mural were trying to inspire the crappy part of Lawrenceville to improve itself, or they were saying to people passing through "sure it's bad here, but another mile down the road the joint is hopping!"
(Click on the image for a larger version of the picture.)
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At Market St. and Duboce in San Francisco, thee's a trippy mural
(shown at right - click on it for a larger version) all about the
wonders of reading. I especially like the way the books blend into
houses. As Joe pointed out, this mural has something in common with
the South
Side Goodwill mural that I blogged about back in February. That
mural is also about books (and the weird faded bluish green people who
reach for them). I think I like the style of the Pittsburgh mural,
but the San Francisco mural is a lot more lyrical.
The books in the picture are: Chaim Potok, "The Chosen", Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Years of Solitude", Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", "The Art Book", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", and Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". An eclectic mix, but all good.
Now that you've put up with my hack criticism, for more information about the mural, try this page. It's evidently part of a larger "Bay Area Mural Awareness Month" program. That's one major difference between Pittsburgh and San Francisco's murals: SF murals are usually documented somewhere. I keep trying, but finding information about Pittsburgh murals is always a challenge. (Disclaimer: I only look for information about the web, so differing amounts of Internet penetration into various cities yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah, don't sue me.)
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On the way
from one side of San Francisco to the other, Joe and I passed Arriba Juntos's building (on
Mission between 14th and 15th), which is painted with an amazing mural
(shown at right - click on it for a larger version). The rest of the
block looked a little desolate, which only emphasized this mural. On
the lower right of the mural, there's a scroll with some writing on
it:
We're blessed to have a mother who comforts our souls with summer breezes, cleansing our bodies with every drop of her sows. Respect her kindness, her love, and her nature. Never throw oil into the stormdrain and always recycle... don't allow the sacrifices made for the future and offered by Earth to have been in vain.
To end on a random note, Arriba Juntos seems to go by its initials, AJ. My hometown synagogue, Adath Jeshurun, also goes by AJ.
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