subject: Bridging the Urban Landscape [print this page] Bridging the Urban Landscape Bridging the Urban Landscape
pittsburgh citynews
Pittsburg at Evening.
By all implies make your 1st method to Pittsburg in the night time time, and you will behold a spectacle which has not a parallel on this continent. Darkness gives the city and its surroundings a picturesqueness which they wholly lack by daylight. It lies very low down in a hollow of encompassing hills, gleaming with a thousand factors of gentle, which are mirrored from the rivers, whose waters glimmer, it may possibly be, in the faint moonlight, and catch and replicate the shadows as effectively. Around the city's edge, and on the sides of the hills which encircle it like a gloomy amphitheatre, their outlines rising dark against the sky, by means of numberless apertures, fiery lights stream forth, wanting angrily and fiercely up towards the heavens, although around all these settles a heavy pall of smoke. It is as although a person had reached the outer edge of the infernal regions, and saw prior to him the good furnace of Pandemonium with all the lids lifted. The scene is so strange and weird that it will dwell in the memory permanently. 1 photos, as he beholds it, the tortured spirits writhing in agony, their sinewy limbs convulsed, and the really air oppressive with pain and rage. But the scene is illusive. This is the domain of Vulcan, not of Pluto. Right here, in this gigantic workshop, in the midst of the materials of his labor, the god of fire, getting left his historic residence on Olympus, and established himself in this more recent globe, stretches himself beside his forge, and sleeps the peaceful sleep which is the reward of sincere industry. Proper at his doorway are mountains of coal to maintain a perpetual fire upon his altar; inside the attain of his outstretched grasp are rivers of coal oil; and a small even more absent fantastic shops of iron for him to forge and weld, and shape into a thousand kinds; and at his feet is the shining river, an impetuous Mercury, ever all set to do his bidding. Grecian mythology in no way conceived of an abode so fitting for the son of Zeus as that which he has chosen for himself on this western hemisphere. And his ancient tasks had been child's play in contrast with the mighty ones he has undertaken nowadays.
A Pittsburg Fog; Failing a evening method, the traveler ought to reach the Iron City on a dismal day in autumn, when the air is large with moisture, and the very atmosphere seems dark. All romance has disappeared. In this nineteenth century the gods of mythology find no location in daylight. There is only a extremely active city shrouded in gloom. The buildings, what ever their original materials and shade, are smoked to a uniform, dirty drab; the smoke sinks, and mingling with the moisture in the air, turns into of a consistency which may virtually be felt as nicely as seen. Beneath a drab sky a drab twilight hangs about the town, and the gas-lights, which are left burning at mid-day, shine out of the murkiness with a uninteresting, reddish glare. This is Pittsburg herself. These days as these are her especial boast, and in their frequency and dismalness, in all the planet she has no rival, conserve London.
