Spa Day @ the Library!

If you’re a teen who will be near the West End Library on Wednesday, stop in to get pampered!

There will be he normal Teen Lounge stuff  – Xbox, Wii, Art Corner, and snacks, but you can also make a body scrub from scratch – this sugar-based concoction will make your skin smoother if you’re into that.

CC licensed photo by flickr user knittycent

You can take home easy skin care recipes to make from stuff you probably have in your own kitchen.

This could be a great Mother’s Day gift, too!

It’s from 4:30-6:30 and is FREE as usual. Check out the event page by clicking here.

Can’t get to the West End on May 1st? Check out these books:

The Green Guide To Natural Beauty by Karen Gilbert

EcoBeauty: Scrubs, Rubs, Masks, and Bath Bombs for You and Your Friends by Lauren Cox

Herbal Crafts: More than 60 Simple Projects to Beautify Your Home and Body by Jessie Hawkins

Home Spa: recipes and techniques to restore and refresh by Mannie Rosa Golden

Recipes for Natural Beauty: 100 homemade treatments for radiant beauty by Katie Spiers

Nature’s Beauty Secrets: recipes for beauty treatments from the world’s best spas by Dawn Gallagher

 

 

 

Know More about Your City

• Pittsburgh is the second largest city in Pennsylvania, and was founded in 1758. 
• There are 89 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh.  Test your knowledge of Pittsburgh neighborhoods with Click That ‘hood.
• 305,704 people live in Pittsburgh.
• There are 446 bridges in Pittsburgh!

• Pittsburgh can claim the first commercial radio station–KDKA and the first public television station–WQED.
• The Pittsburgh Pirates played in the very first World Series in 1903 (Pirates lost) and the very first World Series night game in 1971 (Pirates won).
• Robert Garland, a city councilman, devised the nation’s first Daylight Savings Plan in 1918.  For more Pittsburgh Firsts:  click here.

For more maps of the city see the City of Pittsburgh Online Map Room.  For videos from the 1960′s-1980′s, check out the Historic Pittsburgh Video Collection.

Geographic Information Systems: Department of City Planning

~Marian

CLP–Mt. Washington

Pirates Season preview

Winter is FINALLY over.  So that means that the weather is at last getting nicer and it is time for baseball season!  This should be an interesting year for the hometown Pittsburgh Pirates.  Lat year they almost ended their record streak of 20 losing years in a row, but struggled in the second half and ended up finishing 79-83.  This offseason has seen a few changes, most notably the loss of All-Star closer Joel Hanrahan and the addition of former Yankees catcher Russell Martin and former Twins pitcher Francisco Liriano.

There are some interesting questions this year that will go a long way in determining how well the Pirates do this year.  How will Pedro Alvarez hit?  Will he be the batter who hit 30 home runs or will he be the batter who hit .244 and had 180 strikeouts (second in the National League)?  He will probably be both!  Just like he was last year, but hopefully he can raise his average and cut his strikeouts a bit.

The second big question is when will Gerrit Cole make it to the big leagues, and how will he do when he gets there?  The number 1 overall pick of the 2011 draft had a good spring training, but will start the season with the Triple A Indianapolis Indians.  It is very likely that Cole will be up with the Pirates by the summer and hopefully, he will be the first of many of the young pitching prospects that the team has drafted in the last few years.

America’s Best Ballpark

Even if the Pirates don’t break .500 this year (and I don’t think they will), you can still enjoy the beautiful PNC Park.  It was just named  America’s Best Ballpark by TripAdvisor.com.  The team just announced some of the new features they will have this year and I am already looking forward to the new Brunch Burger, which is a patty made of beef and ground bacon topped with more bacon!  It also has cheddar cheese and a fried egg and is served on a glazed doughnut!

The Brunch Burger!!

Larimer teens discover the music of the future: No Generation Podcast

Just down the street from both CLP – East Liberty and CLP – Homewood is the Kingsley Association, a community center extraordinaire. They have a pool, basketball court, yoga classes, community meetings, and a Youth Advisory Council.

An EEYAC meeting

 

I recently went to an unveiling of the Council’s new project: a podcast called No Generation Radio.

Artwork by Blaine Siegel

Teenagers from EEYAC had come together with local artist Blaine Siegel to create the podcast. They interviewed community members of Larimer to find stories from their past and present dealing with music, and then musicians from Larimer and other Pittsburgh neighborhoods imagined what the music of the future in Larimer would be like, based on those stories.

This includes David Bernabo, who said on his blog that his future music piece was created “us[ing] census data and analysis to forecast how Larimer will change in the future. I imagine that gentrification would occur to some extent and the neighborhood will become more racially integrated. From a musical standpoint, I am presenting music that would exist for an educational use. The idea was that music could be encoded in the future to “push” knowledge to the listener.”

All 7 podcasts can be heard on the No Generation tumblr. Check them out!

 

If you’re interested in creating a podcast, you can do it at the library!  The Labs have the equipment and mentors to help you realize your vision and put it out into the world. Come to one of the Labs locations!

Check out these books to get you started:

  

And, don’t forget, the library has many Teen Advisory Councils in its locations – if you want to bring your fun ideas to the library for old and new friends to enjoy, make it happen!

 

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

 

March Madness-Shamrock Shake edition

March is one of my favorite times of year for two reasons.  The first is that Shamrock Shakes are available at McDonalds.  I LOVE Shamrock Shakes!!  The mint, the cream, the deliciousness.  I wish they sold them all year, but March is the only time to get them.

The second reason I love March is that it is time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament, or March Madness.  This is my favorite sports event of the year-even more than the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup Finals.  I love it so much because it is so unpredictable.  A small school like Butler can go to two straight Final Fours and someone that nobody has ever heard of can become a basketball immortal like Bryce Drew did in 1998.

You can vote for the best players and teams in NCAA history right here.  You can also watch some of the greatest moments in tournament history including Christian Laettner’s famous jumper to beat Kentucky in 1992.

This is a weird year for the tournament because usually there are a couple of teams that are head and shoulders over everybody else, but this year that has not been the case.  Kentucky and NC State were ranked in the top 10 when the season began, but they are not even in the top 25 now, while Gonzaga is ranked number 1 for the first time in school history.  Overall, 5 teams have been ranked number one this season.  So it’s been a topsy turvy year this year with no clear cut favorite going into the tournament.  I’m hoping that Gonzaga can pull it off, but if not then I am hoping for lots of excitement and upsets.  Hope you all have a great time watching this year’s tournament (with a Shamrock Shake of course!)

Pittsburgh: haunted by historical photographs and documentary poetry!!

Have you ever taken a walk down a Pittsburgh street and wondered what wonderful or terrible things may have happened there in years past?  There’s a way to maybe find out.

crazy clown time

Go to Retrographer to see the past overlaid upon the present.  There, over 5,000 historic images of Pittsburgh have been tagged to the locations at which they were taken.  You can see that in 1935, there was a particularly scary Halloween Party  happening in front of the fountain at the Frick Fine Arts building (read: clowns) and that trolley car tracks used to criss-cross Centre Street.  You can check out how bustling East Liberty looked in 1928, and a road crew working in Homewood, around 1910, looking towards some very familiar rowhouses on Hamilton Ave. that I drive past almost every day of my life.

Or maybe you’d like to take a walk and read poems about the streets on which you’re wandering?  Then get yourself over to Public Record, a project done in 2010-11 by Justin Hopper in connection with Encyclopedia Destructica and Deeplocal.

Hopper uses poetry to expose history.  You can download an iPhone app that will show you a map of Pittsburgh and the locations that correspond to the poems, written about what daily life was like in 19th century Pittsburgh.  Or you can download the MP3s for free.

I hope these sites will inspire you to go create your own Pittsburgh-centered creative works.  Find some history there, at the library, or the Heinz History Center Archives, and make it your own. Submit it to the Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest. Record it in words, film or music at the Labs.   Find the cutest historical boy from Historic Pittsburgh and send the link to My Daguerreotype Boyfriend.

Happy exploring,

-Tessa, CLP-East Liberty

It’s that time again-Football is almost here!

The Olympics are FINALLY over (thank God) and it is almost time for the NFL to start playing real games!  The season kicks off on Wednesday, Spetember 5th with a matchup between the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys.  Of course the big game locally is the Steelers against the Denver Broncos.  That might be the most watched game of the first week since many people will be tuning in to watch Peyton Manning play his first regular season game for the Broncos.

There will be lots of interesting storylines this season, both with the Steelers and around the league.  Some of the questions with the Steelers include how the team will deal with the loss of veteran leaders like Hines Ward and James Farrior, how new offensive coordinator Todd Haley will mesh with Ben Roethlisberger, the inexperienced offensive line, and injuries to James Harrison and Rashard Mendenhall.  It should be an interesting season as the Steelers try to hold off some up and coming AFC teams like the Cincinnati Bengals and Buffalo Bills.

Around the league some of the most interesting stories will be the soap opera of the New York Jets and Tim Tebow, the rookie seasons of top draft picks Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, and how the Bountygate scandal will affect the New Orleans Saints.  It should be an interesting year for football fans that is for sure.  I am excited for the year to begin and my predictions are that the Packers will defeat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVII, Aaron Rodgers will win the MVP Award, the Steelers will not win the division but be a wild card team, and the Bills will end their streak of non-playoff years with a wild card appearance.

Pittsburgh as Gotham as Pittsburgh

As a fan of most things Batman-related (Joel Schumacher irrevocably destroyed a small part of my soul in the mid to late 90’s), I recently dropped by one of the coolest places in Pittsburgh, the Toonseum, to check out one of their ongoing exhibits… “Pittsburgh as Gotham.”  If you’ve never been to the Toonseum, I definitely recommend making an end-of-summer-oh-no-school’s-coming-back pilgrimage – I mean, a museum of cartoons, comics, and animation… how can you go wrong?

The ”Pittsburgh as Gotham” exhibit highlights the Burgh’s many ties to the Dark Knight which, if you don’t know, go way beyond just the Dark Knight Rises being filmed here.  Pittsburgh’s own Michael Keaton played Bruce Wayne/Batman in the first two Tim Burton movies, and Frank Gorshin (also from Pittsburgh) played the Riddler in the old school (BAM! KA-POW!) Adam West Batman TV show from the 60’s.  Apart from those guys, a whole bunch of artists from the area have worked on Batman comics over the years, and much of their artwork is on display.  The exhibit also features props from the newer Christopher Nolan movies (e.g. the cape and cowl, batarangs) that are on loan from Warner Brothers Studios.

“Pittsburgh as Gotham” will be on display until October 7th.  The Toonseum also has two other ongoing exhibits: “Pearls Before Swine:  The Art of Stephan Pastis” and “Care Bears: 30 Years of Caring…and Hugs” – who doesn’t love them some Care Bears?

Some choice Batman:

    

Jon : CLP Carrick

Know Your Pittsburgh Icons: Andy Warhol

You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.

- Andy Warhol

Monday would have been the 84^th birthday of the iconic artist Andy Warhol, pop art pioneer and one of the Steel City’s native sons, born and raised right here in Pittsburgh. He grew up in South Oakland, graduated from Schenley High School, studied graphic design in college, worked some gigs as a commercial illustrator, and eventually headed to New York City, where he opened up his studio (infamously dubbed “The Factory”), cultivated a vibrant creative community, hung out with folks like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, & Mick Jagger, and pretty much spent the rest of his life making art history. Almost anyone would recognize his iconic Campbell’s Soup cans and his eye-popping portraits of celebs like Marilyn Monroe & Mao Zedong.

Pittsburgh is home to the Andy Warhol Museum, which is the largest American art museum dedicated to a single artist. If you haven’t been there yet, it’s definitely worth a visit. The galleries are packed with more than 12,000 Andy Warhol originals in every medium imaginable—paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, films, audio recordings— you name it. Plus, the exhibitions are changing all the time, constantly featuring unseen Warhol artwork unearthed from the archives, as well as the work of other artists.

Andy Warhol by Jack Mitchell

During The Factory days, Andy liked to take dreamy, slow motion film portraits of friends, actors, celebrities, and whoever dropped by the studio. Starting this week, you can drop into the museum and create your own screen test—pick your background, adjust your lighting, and get ready for your close up. It’s interactive art at its best.

When Andy Warhol died in 1987, he was buried in a small cemetery a few miles outside of Pittsburgh. In spite of the low profile of his final resting place, fans have flocked to the site for years now to pay homage to the eccentric artist. Some play bagpipes; others perform séances. Many of them leave something behind—cans of Campbell’s Soup, a bottle of perfume, a handwritten note here and there. Local artist Madelyn Roehrig has been hanging out at the grave for four years now to document the stream of eclectic tributes to the artist that adorn his eternal home. On Monday, she hosted a birthday party for Andy in the cemetery, complete with birthday cake and belly-dancers. You can check out the project on Facebook and read about it here.

Andy Warhol: artist, collector, experimenter, pop philosopher, Pittsburgher. Why not dig into a little local history and find out more about him? You can start at the library.

     

My Guide to a Fun Summer Close to Home.

It’s happened.  Summer is here, school is out and free time abounds.   I’m sure you’ve got plans for some of your summer vacation.  Maybe you’ve lined up a part time job, a volunteer shift, summer camp or just rest and relaxation. Even if you’re totally booked you owe it to yourself to get out and enjoy the beautiful weather and amazing activities available.

If you’re into walking, running or biking around town check out the Heritage Trail system that crisscrosses the city.  Don’t have a bike but feel like riding?  No problem.  Or if aquatic recreation is more your style take a flat water kayak for a spin.  Don’t forget about the many city parks all around town or the 18 public pools throughout the city.

If you can get out of town for the day, take a drive to one of  Pennsylvania’s beautiful State Parks.   In Western Pa alone there are 22 State Parks.  To the south check out Ohiopyle State Park for amazing views, and some of the best whitewater boating in the east.  A short drive west will take you to Raccoon Creek State Park for horseback riding, hiking, mountain biking, and swimming.  Head north to Moraine State Park for two huge beaches, wind surfing and boating or to McConnell’s Mill for more advanced whitewater boating or hiking.  If you can take a longer adventure, head two and a half hours north to Lake Erie’s Presque Isle State Park where there are tons of beach, hiking trails and views of PA’s favorite Great Lake.

These ideas are just the beginning.  Share your favorite things to do in Western PA in the comments!

-Brooke

CLP-South Side